Zika virus (ZIKV) was discovered in the Zika Forest of Uganda during research supported by the Rockefeller Foundation to study the enzootic or sylvatic cycle of yellow fever virus and to identify additional arboviruses. Sentinel Rhesus monkeys were placed into the canopy in April, 1947 and one developed fever and viremia, leading to ZIKV isolation by inoculation of its blood intracranially into infant mice. The following January, ZIKV was isolated from the canopy-dwelling mosquito Aedes africanus collected at the same site ( Dick et al., 1952). The first characterization of human disease following ZIKV infection (2 cases based on seroconversion and one case based on virus isolation from the serum of a febrile girl) occurred in Nigeria during 1954 (Macnamara, 1954). These cases were accompanied by fever, headache, diffuse joint pain, and in one case, slight jaundice. Two years later, experimental infection of a yellow fever-vaccinated human volunteer with a 6th mouse brain-passaged ZIKV strain from the 1954 Nigerian human isolates resulted in a relatively mild febrile illness (slight headache, malaise, fever) associated with natural infection. Attempts to demonstrate transmission by Aedes (Stegomyia) aegypti mosquitoes fed on the infected volunteer did not succeed ( Bearcroft, 1956). The first direct detection of ZIKV in Asia as well as the first evidence of transmission by an urban vector occurred when the virus was isolated from A. aegypti mosquitoes collected in Malaysia in 1966 ( Marchette et al., 1969). Eleven years later, the first human infections in Asia were diagnosed from central Java in Indonesia by seroconversion in seven patients presented with fever, malaise, stomach ache, anorexia and dizziness (Olson et al., 1981).