Confirming its first case of bird flu in a human, Bangladesh has become the 15th country in the world to report a human case of H5N1 avian influenza. The virus was found in a 16-month-old boy from Dhaka who fell ill in January and is now recovering. The case was confirmed by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention on Thursday. It has been found that the infected boy does not live on or near a chicken farm, but in one of the capital’s crowded and unhygienic slums.

The samples were the sent to the CDC in January because the virus could not be typed in Bangladesh, said a senior official in the World Health Organisation (WHO). The United Nations agency took several months for testing to be completed before officially announcing the results.

“The H5N1 virus was first detected in Bangladesh in March last year and since then the authorities have culled around 2 million chickens and destroyed millions of eggs,” said an official. Fifty of the country’s 64 districts were affected and 40 per cent of its poultry farms were closed at the peak of the outbreaks, causing “losses of about 45 billion taka ($650 million) for the growing poultry sector, which accounts for 1.6 percent of the impoverished nation’s gross domestic product,” said a WHO spokesperson.

Experts fear the H5N1 strain could mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic, especially in countries where people live in close proximity to backyard poultry. The human case in Bangladesh has put the Indian Government on its toes. The Department of Animal Husbandry has recently attributed the spread of the virus to illegal smuggling of poultry from Bangladesh to neighbouring states like Tripura. The country has also been suspected of being the source of past outbreaks in West Bengal and Manipur. Although the border has been sealed, the effectiveness of the measure is still open to question.

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