Zika probably won’t be

as bad in the U.S. as it is in Brazil, says a science expert with the International Congress of Entomology.

When the International Congress of Entomology decided four years ago to hold its meeting in Orlando, the Zika virus was hardly on anyone’s radar.

“We weren’t putting a lot research emphasis on it, simply because since it was discovered in 1947, it wasn’t seen as an important human disease just based on the numbers,” said Dr. Stephen Higgs, professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology at Kansas Sate University.

That changed in 2015, when the virus exploded in Brazil.

On Monday, during a symposium at the conference, Higgs and some of the field’s foremost scientists talked about their research.

“There’s no such other thing in nature,” said Dr. Walter Leal, co-organizer of the conference and a distinguished professor of molecular and cellular biology at UC Davis. “With other diseases, you get it, you get sick, you pay the price. But ... with Zika, it’s the offspring that’s affected. It opens the debate on whether it’s right to have an abortion if the baby is affected. It goes into another dimension and opens a big area of discussion.”

Since early this year, there have been more than 3,300 travel-related cases of Zika infection in the United States and more than 19,700 local cases in U.S. territories.

“I don’t think Zika is going to be as big a problem [in the U.S.] as it is in Brazil, but it’s like saying it’s safer to travel by airplane than by car,” said Leal. “I agree, but if you’re in that airplane that crashed, the statistics aren’t good for you.”