U.S. President Barack Obama will ask the Congress for more than 1.8 billion U.S. dollars in emergency funding to help combat the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen believed to cause babies to be born with abnormally small heads, the White House said Monday.

The proposal, set to be submitted to the Congress Tuesday as part of Obama's fiscal 2017 budget plan, would support strategies to curb the virus, such as rapidly expanding mosquito control programs; accelerating vaccine research and diagnostic development and enabling the testing and procurement of vaccines and diagnostics.

The money would also help educate health care providers, pregnant women and their partners; improve epidemiology and expand laboratory and diagnostic testing capacity; improve health services and support for low-income pregnant women, and enhance the ability of Zika-affected countries to better combat mosquitoes and control transmission.

"As spring and summer approach, bringing with them larger and more active mosquito populations, we must be fully prepared to mitigate and quickly address local transmission within the continental U.S., particularly in the southern United States," the White House said in a statement.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would receive 1.48 billion dollars, more than half of that for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to support readiness and response capacity, implement surveillance efforts, improve laboratory capacity for Zika testing and establish rapid response teams.

The U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department would receive 376 million dollars in total to support affected countries' ability to control mosquitoes and the transmission of the virus.

The Pan American Health Organization reported 26 countries and territories in the Americas with local Zika transmission.

The U.S. CDC also reported 50 laboratory-confirmed cases among U.S. travelers from December 2015 to Feb. 5.

In an interview aired Monday on "CBS This Morning", Obama urged the public not to panic.

"The good news is this is not like Ebola, people don't die of Zika -- a lot of people get it and don't even know that they have it," Obama said. "What we now know though is that there appears to be some significant risk for pregnant women or women who are thinking about getting pregnant."

Zika, which usually causes mild illness, has been linked to about 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly in infants in Brazil. U.S. CDC Director Tom Frieden told a teleconference Friday that such fetal harm was "new phenomenon" but "the association is looking stronger and stronger." Enditem

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