WILLIAMSBURG, Va. – A College of William & Mary student came home from winter break in Central America with the Zika virus, a mosquito-transmitted infection that’s quickly spreading across the continent.

A college Informational Health Advisory reports the student is not currently experiencing symptoms of the virus – which typically include rash, fever, mild headaches and joint pain – and is not though to pose a health risk on campus.

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The advisory, posted to the school’s website, explains that the virus is spread mostly through mosquito bites, but rarely requires hospitalization. Roughly one in five people infected become ill, and there currently is no vaccine.

“Though the exact incubation period for the Zika virus disease is not known, researchers believe it to be a few days to a week,” according to the release.

“The Zika virus, carried by mosquitos, is now in two dozen countries and territories across the Americas,” The Washington Post reports. “Brazil has been reported as the epicenter, and some health experts believe it could cause an abnormally small head and brain in babies born to mothers who contracted Zika while pregnant.”

The World Health Organization convened an emergency meeting Feb. 1 after WHO director general Margaret Chan said days earlier the number of infected people across South America has exploded in recent weeks.

“The latest figures from Columbia, released over the weekend, backed (Chan’s) analysis, showing 20,297 confirmed cases of the disease in the South American country, including 2,116 pregnant women, making it the second most affected country after Brazil,” the Guardian reports. “According to Columbian officials, the number of pregnant women confirmed to be affected has doubled in a week.”

Some health experts, like London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine director Peter Piot, are urging the WHO to declare a public health emergency, and point to the organization’s slow reaction to the Ebola virus as an example of why officials should act now.

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“WHO clearly dropped the ball when it came to responding to the Ebola virus. It took about five months to declare the Ebola virus in west Africa as a public health emergency of international concern,” Piot said.

“Today that (WHO) committee is meeting and I have all the confidence that they will declare this as a public health emergency,” he said. “Several reports have been published (on the WHO’s Ebola response) and the WHO can, and must, do better.”

Georgetown University professor of public health law, Lawrence Gostin, seems to agree with Piot, and said he believes the WHO should have acted as soon as officials realized the potential impact the virus has on pregnant women.

“My chief criticism is of WHO in Geneva,” Gostin told Reuters, according to the Guardian. “After being widely condemned for acting late on Ebola, it is now sitting back with Zika.”

The Zika virus was first identified in 1952 and remained largely confined to Africa and Asia until the recent epidemic in South America that surfaced in 2015, according to Wikipedia.