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The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday issued new guidelines for blood banks intended to help prevent the contamination of the nation’s blood supply with the Zika virus. Among other measures, the agency called for blood banks in areas where the virus is transmitted locally — like Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands — to import whole blood and red blood cells from regions without an outbreak instead of using local donations. (Saint Louis, 2/16)

The Food and Drug Administration is recommending delays for blood donations from people deemed at risk of having the Zika virus. (Sullivan, 2/16)

Federal and international health officials confessed Tuesday to an encyclopedic list of unanswered questions about the fast-spreading Zika virus, which in a matter of months has become an international public health crisis. In a bleak assessment of their ability to confront the disease, epidemiologists, public health experts, scientists and researchers – one by one –told a conference on Zika of their concerns that too little was known about diagnosing the disease and about how it might be spread. (Ordonez, 2/16)

The World Health Organization says it will take $56 million to kickstart a coordinated international response to the Zika virus outbreak racing through much of the Americas, and the WHO plans to tap a newly created emergency contingency fund to pay for the initial efforts. In a lengthy action plan published Tuesday, the organization said a hefty chunk of the money will go toward disease surveillance, which will include tracking new Zika cases and the suspected birth defects and rare autoimmune syndrome that scientists suspect are linked to the mosquito-borne virus. (Dennis, 2/16)

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun working with medical researchers in northeast Brazil to investigate the suspected link between the Zika virus and a rare condition that causes brain and skull deformities in newborns. About 15 epidemiologists and experts in birth defects will be working in coming weeks in João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba state, one of the states that has recorded surging numbers of cases of the condition called microcephaly. The first several members of the CDC’s team arrived Sunday, the organization said. (Johnson, McKay and Jelmayer, 2/16)

Experts say there's no evidence that an increase in birth defects in Brazil, which has coincided with an outbreak of Zika virus, is due to pesticides used to kill mosquito larvae. ... The Argentine environmentalists' claims have stoked conspiracy theories online and in social media, causing some to proclaim the Zika virus a hoax. On its web site, the group claims that spraying mosquitoes using planes is "criminal, useless and a political maneuver" to make it appear that governments are taking action. The root of Zika, the group claims, "lies in inequality and poverty." (Szabo, 2/16)