Almost 300 pregnant women in the U.S. have tested positive for Zika virus, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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The increase is, in part, because there are more pregnant women with the virus, and officials are keeping track of them in a different way.
Previously, the CDC only released public data on a subset of Zika-affected pregnancies. In a change announced Friday, May 20, 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will count all women who tested positive, regardless of whether they had suffered symptoms.
Of those, 157 women live in US states and 122 live in USA territories.
Zika can cause a birth defect called microcephaly and other serious brain abnormalities.
The outbreak began almost a year ago in Brazil.
Brazil and other Latin American countries have seen a serious uptick in birth defects amid their Zika outbreaks, and scientists fear that Aedes mosquitoes will start to spread the virus on the US mainland, once temperatures rise and insect populations flourish.
What has not been clear is whether the fetus of a woman who is infected but never had any symptoms is likely to have a birth defect.
Already, countries such as El Salvador and Jamaica have urged women to postpone pregnancy.
Until now, the CDC defined and reported cases of Zika as people who had symptoms and a positive test for the virus. The territories have reported 832 cases of locally acquired Zika, a lot of them in Puerto Rico.
Obama has asked Congress to allocate $1.9 billion to address the outbreak. The Senate has approved $1.1 billion; the House has approved $622 billion.
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It comes after the US Swimming team moved a pre-Olympic training camp from Puerto Rico to Atlanta over fears about the Zika virus.
