Mirror reporter Matt Roper was one of just five Britons who contracted Zika during the outbreak of the virus in Brazil in 2016.
Matt was living in the country at the time, during which he reported on the epidemic that quickly swept the South American nation.
Now, scientist are warnings that the dreaded disease could come to Britain as warmer, more humid air caused by global wamring brings the mosquitos which spread it further north.
Here Matt remembers his own experience of coming down with Zika:
The symptoms came upon me suddenly, jolting me out of my sleep in the middle of the night.
I began to shiver and sweat, hoping that I’d just eaten something that didn’t agree with me, and I’d feel better by daylight.
But the next morning I woke with an excruciating headache, pain behind my eyeballs, feeling weak with aching, shivering limbs.
I took some medicine and tried to carry on as normal, imagining I was coming down with something.
The dreaded word Zika didn't cross my mind, even though I was living in Brazil, the country at the epicentre of the global health scare.
But by nightfall I knew this wasn't your normal cold or flu.
The shivering and fevers came in waves during the entire night, making me weaker and weaker, sweat dripping constantly from my body.
By the morning my bed was so drenched it looked like someone had thrown a bucket of water onto it.
I was already suffering from dehydration and at one point my mouth was so dry I could hardly swallow.
When I got up in the middle of the night to drink water I found my legs had lost their strength and I toppled over onto the floor.
After three nights the fevers subsided but then, as if a switch had been flicked, a red rash began to engulf my entire body.
At the same time, my joints began to seize up. I felt like an old man as I tried to walk, with my knees, ankles and toes stiff and aching.
My feet and hands were red and swollen.
Perhaps worst of all, though, was the infernal itching.
My skin felt like it was crawling with thousands of tiny ants, and as much as I scratched and scratched, nothing relieved it.
It was then that I realised this could only be Zika.
As a journalist covering Brazil, I had visited areas affected by the outbreak and heard from others who had been struck down by the virus.
And as I talked to friends I knew who had also been infected, they confirmed the changing symptoms, almost to the hour.
And just like clockwork, exactly a week after my symptoms began, they stopped almost as suddenly.
Apart from the itching, which continued to bother me for a number of weeks after.
Perhaps most worrying though, was the unknown.
Had I survived Zika, or was this unpredictable disease still hiding some nasty surprises?
I knew that the virus remained inside me weeks after I had got better - that was why I was told not to have sexual intercourse for at least eight weeks.
But just how long does it lie dormant, and might it come back one day with a vengeance?
What was clear as the Zika epidemic spread through Brazil was that no-one, not even virologists and doctors, really knew that much about it - what it can do, how it is spread, or the long-term effects on those who catch it.
At first the up to 1.5million people in Brazil who caught it were told that, if they were not pregnant women, the virus would not cause any serious problems.
It wasn’t long, however that scientists were warning that the mosquito-borne virus may be even more dangerous than previously thought, with as many as 20 per cent of Zika-infected pregnancies resulting in some form of brain damage to the baby in the womb.
Children, they warned might show no obvious sign of neurological damage until later in life, when they might start having "convulsions or other tell-tale signs"
Up until then the disease had been only linked to microcephaly, the 'shrunken head' syndrome in babies, which is estimated to affect one percent of Zika-affected pregnancies.
Later, and after I had recovered from my Zika bout, the scientific community admitted that the virus might be linked to other serious brain diseases in adults too.
Brazil's health ministry confirmed three adult deaths caused by Zika in the country, while scientists reported a marked increase in the number of neurological diseases appearing in adults since the start of the Zika outbreak.
Even so, I still consider myself lucky, because of what I had seen and heard as I travelled Brazil investigating this cruel virus.
While my experience with Zika left me anxious about the future, I knew that hundreds of families have already been destroyed by the disease.
I was the first reporter to visit Goiana, a small, impoverished town in the northeastern state of Pernambuco which has the highest Zika infection rate than anywhere in the country, with almost half the town's population of 87,000 already believed to have been infected.
Already in the rural town, 27 babies have been born with microcephaly - at 6.3 per 1,000 live births, the highest rate of 'shrunken baby' syndrome anywhere in the world.
On the day I visited, even the mayor Frederico Gadelha, who recently declared a state of emergency in the town, was bedridden with Zika.
He told me that, with over 500 people contracting the virus every day, health services in the town were no longer able to cope.
"My town is in chaos. This is an emergency, the worst this town has ever experienced," he said.
Later I sat with a sobbing young couple in their tiny brick home whose baby daughter, Luiza Vitoria, died last month, 37 days after she had been born with microcephaly.
The girl's mother, Silvana, was inconsolable and had to be held by a relative as she remembered how her beautiful daughter was cruelly taken from her.
She had come down with Zika when she was ten months
She said: "I still can't believe she's gone. I cry all the time. I still wake up and see her in my room.
"I hear her crying, I smell her around the house. I miss her so much."
In Recife, the nearby state capital considered the epicentre of the outbreak, I met other new mothers who were desperately trying to cope with caring for their severely-disabled babies.
Some had had to leave their jobs and even their husbands, who had walked out on them after discovering that the baby wasn't 'normal'.
One mother told me how her husband left for work one day and never came back just a month after their microcephaly baby was born.
She now had to survive on a sickness benefit she received of £152 a month, a half of which goes on paying the rent.
She told of her fears that, like many other mothers, she might soon have no choice but to give up her baby: "I feel completely alone. I love my baby, but honestly don't know how long I will manage to cope.
"All I wanted was to start a family with my husband, and I was so happy when I fell pregnant. But this virus destroyed all my dreams."
The worst was hearing how these innocent young infants were suffering.
Increased pressure on the child's brain causes most to cry constantly, while eight out of 10 start to suffer seizures and other health complications before they are one.
As their brain presses against their deformed skull, the children also develop problems with eyesight, hearing, heart problems, eating problems and fits.
A social worker who runs a support group for mothers with shrunken head babies in Recife told me how the women often arrived exhausted and broke down in tears as they tell of their struggles.
Their greatest challenge, she said, was convincing the mothers to not give up in the face of seemingly insurmountable difficulties.
I later visited an orphanage in Recife preparing to receive an expected deluge of unwanted Zika babies. Already, the home has taken in a newborn baby girl who was abandoned by her poor mother.
I'll never forget holding this tiny girl and wondering what her future will hold.
My brush with Zika, I hope, won't come back to haunt me.
But for her, and for a generation of other babies, and their families, the nightmare of this terrifying virus had only just begun.