Washington: The Zika virus may have arrived in the Americas in 2013, more than a year before the virus was reported in Brazil, a genetic study has said.

In a study published in the US journal Science, scientists from Britain's University of Oxford and Brazil's Evandro Chagas Institute sequenced seven genomes of the Brazilian Zika virus, including one fatal adult case and one newborn with the birth condition microcephaly, Xinhua reported.