On Oct 1, 2015, a 52-year-old man was hospitalised with exanthema and conjunctivitis at the Academic Hospital in Paramaribo, Suriname. During the next few days, four patients were admitted with mild symptoms including exanthema. Sera from these patients were negative for dengue and chikungunya viruses but positive for Zika virus (ZIKV) by specific real-time reverse transcription PCR. 1 ZIKV is an emerging arthropodborne virus of the family Flaviviridae. It is transmitted by aedes mosquitoes, as are dengue and chikungunya viruses. First isolated in April, 1947, in Uganda, it was until recently considered to cause sporadic benign human infections in Africa and Asia. After the first documented outbreak on Yap Island, Micronesia, in 2007, however, ZIKV caused a large epidemic in French Polynesia in 2013–14, before spreading throughout the Pacific. 2 This large epidemic occurred concomitantly with circulation of dengue viruses and unusual increases in severe neurological complications, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome3 and congenital neurological malformations. Also during 2013–14, chikungunya emerged and spread in the Americas. Soon after, the first evidence was found of the emergence of ZIKV in the Americas, in northeast Brazil in May, 2015. 4 Autochthonous circulation of ZIKV in other countries started on Oct 16, 2015, in Colombia,