Obama discusses Zika concerns with Brazilian president

The US and Brazil have agreed to work together to develop a vaccine against the Zika virus which is spreading rapidly across the Americas, according to Sky News.

During a phone call on Friday evening, US President Barack Obama and his Brazilian counterpart Dilma Rousseff discussed their "shared concerns" about the mosquito-borne disease, which has been linked to brain defects in babies.

"The leaders agreed on the importance of collaborative efforts to deepen our knowledge, advance research, and accelerate work to develop better vaccines and other technologies to control the virus," the White House said in a statement.

It said the pair also "agreed to continue to prioritize building national, regional and global capacity to combat infectious disease threats more broadly".

Rousseff's office said a high-level bilateral group would "develop a partnership in the production of vaccines and therapeutics".

It will be based on an existing cooperation agreement between Brazil's Butantan Institute of biomedical research and the US National Institutes of Health to develop a vaccine against dengue.

Since Zika was detected in Latin America last year there has been a surge in babies born with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads.

Brazil, the hardest hit, sounded the alarm in October, when a rash of microcephaly cases emerged in the northeast. Since then, there have been 270 confirmed cases of microcephaly and 3,448 suspected cases, up from 147 in 2014.