Globalization, with consequent increased travel and trade, rapid urbanization and growing weather variation events due to climate change has contributed to the recent unprecedented Zika virus (ZIKV) pandemic. This has emphasized the pressing need for local, national, regional and global community collaborative proactiveness, leadership and financial investment resilience in research and development. This paper addresses the potential knowledge gaps and impact of early detection and monitoring approaches on ZIKV epidemics and related arboviral infections steered towards effective prevention and smart response strategies. We advocate for the development and validation of robust field and point of care diagnostic tools that are more sensitive, specific and cost effective for use in ZIKV epidemics and routine pathophysiology surveillance and monitoring systems as an imperative avenue in understanding Zika-related and other arbovirus trends and apply genomic and proteomic characterisation approaches in guiding annotation efforts in order to design and implement public health burden mitigation and adaptation strategies.