Bangladesh has been plagued with the virus over the last few months

The bad news for the country of Bangladesh is that it has recorded its first human incident of an infection with the H5N1 strain of bird flu. Originally when a sample had been tested in Bangladesh by the Health Ministry it was found to be negative but on further testing done by the United States Centre for Disease Control and Prevention the sample came up as positive.

The patient who is a sixteen month old boy from the capital city of Dhaka was lucky to come away with his life and is said to be fully recovered from his ordeal. The case has been confirmed by the World Health Organisation and has been added to the official statistics for the disease.

The Ministry of Health said that it is likely that the H5N1 bird flu virus infected the boy after the family bought chickens from a farm which was later noted to have a lot of poultry infected with the virus. Interestingly however the family lived some distance from the farm and would not have been considered as high risk at all. The Government of Bangladesh claim that they have emergency measures in place to deal with an outbreak of the bird flu virus should it start to infect a lot of humans.

Bangladesh is now the fifteenth country in the world which has suffered from a human infection of the H5N1 bird flu virus. Bangladesh has been plagued with the virus over the last few months and experts said it was only a matter of time before there was a human infection reported. To control the outbreaks over one million birds had to be slaughtered and it is estimated that as many as one and a half million jobs were lost in the poultry industry in Bangladesh which evidently is the biggest in the world.

There have yet to be any human cases of the bird flu virus in Europe or in America.