With new Zika virus cases showing up in countries across the Americas, the World Health Organization (WHO) has officially declared a public health emergency over the spread of the disease on Monday.
The label “public health emergency” is used as a tool of last resort to encourage political action when the threat of an epidemic is dire. Last year, WHO was criticized for having declared such an emergency far too late into the Ebola crisis, when over 1,000 people had already died from the disease, AP reports.
