The U.S. government has started the research to find a vaccine for the Zika virus that is spreading like wildfire in Latin America. The said virus has already reached the Northern Hemisphere. President Barack Obama called a meeting on Tuesday with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) at The White House, per the Associated Press.

Obama wants to speed their research in order to prevent an even bigger epidemic as well as the proper way to diagnose and treat the mosquito-borne disease. The meeting also tackled the effects of the Zika virus in the U.S. economy and development.

"Zika has been a relatively inconsequential virus as far as we were concerned in the United States or even globally. However, we have been working for some time, intensively and quite successfully, on viruses that are very similar," Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH told TIME.

"Things like this tend not to go away. Cases may go up and down, but it's not just going to go away, so you need to start working on a vaccine now. It may be important in a year from now or six months from now, we don't know," he added.

The Zika virus has been linked with microcephaly, a rare birth defect in newborn babies where the brain fails to properly develop resulting to a small, deformed head. According to FOX News, Brazil has the most number of cases of microcephaly with over 3,500 since the outbreak in October 2015. The Brazilian government has already started research on a possible vaccine and has continued to find ways to decrease the population of the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

The New York Times also noted that the Zika virus may also be linked to an increasing number of cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome in Brazil and El Salvador. Guillain-Barre is a rare condition, where the immune system attacks the nervous system leaving the victim paralyzed and eventually leading to death in some cases.

The CDC has already issued a travel warning for pregnant women that are planning or scheduled to travel to 25 countries and territories in the Americas, Caribbean Islands, Pacific Islands and Africa confirmed with Zika virus cases. The list of areas includes Barbados, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Saint Martin, Samoa, Suriname, U.S. Virgin Islands and Venezuela.

The virus originated from the Zika Forest in Uganda, Africa where a monkey was diagnosed with yellow fever in 1947. Since its discovery, confirmed cases were rare until 2007 when an outbreak hit many islands in the Pacific including the Cook Islands, Easter Island, Micronesia, New Caledonia, Polynesia and Yap Island, per ZikaVirus.net.