When I think about public health recommendations, I think about what I would want for my own family, and in this case, for my own wife. I don't think in terms of population management and rationing as a disease control officer must do.

What to do about the Zika virus?

As this -- another viral disease -- emerges, we're again facing down a primordial threat that reminds us we are animals in an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem that's changing with us and because of us. Beating back Zika will require openness to innovation in both technology and policy. The primary mosquito species now transmitting Zika virus throughout numerous countries in the Americas, Aedes aegypti, actually evolved alongside humans to target us specifically, versus other animals. Now it is spreading its domain, due to the warming climate and its predilection for our built-up environment. Mosquitos have already altered human history before by causing millions of deaths via the spread of yellow fever and Dengue, two viruses that are closely related to Zika.

Some 3,893 cases of microcephaly in infants (and untold miscarriages) in Brazil alone appear linked to the Zika virus.

While we lack definitive proof that the virus caused the severe cerebral and skull deformities these newborns are suffering with, the evidence we've got mandates decisive action. Doctors have found Zika virus in the amniotic fluid of affected fetuses and in the placentas and brains of miscarried fetuses with microcephaly.

We know from prior Zika outbreaks in the South Pacific that the virus can attack the nervous system, causing a paralysis called Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

Related viruses like West Nile are well known to infect the brain. But the Brazil outbreak is the first time Zika is being correlated to this microcephalic congenital deformity. The numbers alone are stark evidence: With no other new variable apparent than the rapidly spreading Zika virus, Brazil saw a 20-fold increase in microcephaly cases in 2015 over 2014.

A Zika vaccine is possible, and that's a step National Institutes of Health leaders would surely facilitate.

But given the pace of Zika infections in South America, the long timeline for vaccine development allows for too much suffering. We've got to take other steps if we can. Another approach is underway and showing success in some South American and Caribbean countries, and is under review by the Food and Drug Administration. This strategy targets the mosquitoes themselves.

A British biotech company, Oxitec, has produced genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes by inserting two genes, one that makes its eggs glow under UV light, to help with its identification, and one that causes its offspring to die.