At the same time, a growing body of evidence accumulated in favor of Zika being the culprit. A twenty-five-year-old Slovenian woman, returning from a stint in Brazil’s Zika-ridden northeast, found herself pregnant with a baby conceived while on the job. At twenty weeks’ gestation, her fetus appeared normal, but by thirty-two weeks doctors had found evidence of retarded growth and a head circumference in the second percentile for the fetus’s gestational age. On ultrasound, the fetus’s brain tissue appeared blurred and shrunken. The mother terminated the pregnancy and, after approval from the ethics board, gave the fetus over to scientists for study. When they examined the brain under a microscope, it looked inflamed and infected, and when they ran a molecular analysis they found Zika DNA present throughout the tissue. The results of their study, published in March in the New England Journal of Medicine, fell in line with results published one month prior by a group of Brazilian researchers in The Lancet, who found Zika in the amniotic-fluid samples of two pregnant women whose fetuses had been diagnosed with microcephaly. Still, for most of the scientific community, it all fell short of definitive proof. “You can't prove a scientific reality by compiling different anecdotes, no matter how true they are,” David Morens, a senior scientific adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters in February.