Visitors arriving in Peru by air on Tuesday from Zika-infected countries were given condoms as part of a government campaign to curb the sexual transmission of the virus.

The measure follows Peru's announcement on the weekend of its first case of Zika contracted on its territory. A 32-year-old woman in the capital Lima caught the virus through sex with her partner, who was believed to have been infected on a recent trip to Venezuela.

Zika, present in much of tropical Latin America and some South Pacific islands, is linked to birth defects in babies.

It is typically spread by mosquitoes, but some cases of sexual transmission from infected partners have been detected.

Health authorities in Chile for the first time in decades found a specimen of the mosquito species responsible for spreading the virus and said on Tuesday more were likely to appear.

Chile eradicated the Aedes aegypti mosquito species in 1961 on its mainland and the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said it does not expect the Zika virus to spread to the country.

The mosquito specimen was found dead in a home in the city of Arica, located some 1,033 miles north of capital city Santiago in the Atacama desert next to the border with Peru, health authorities said.