How did all this start? The first case of Zika dates all the way back to 1947 when it was detected in a monkey in Uganda. Since that time, there were two major outbreaks in humans, the first was in Yap, an island in the Pacific in 2007. Many of the earliest reports of the effects of the virus come from the large outbreak in French Polynesia in 2013-2014, which affected 28,000 people.