Independent laboratory tests confirmed that a 16 month old baby boy in Bangladesh, who is now recovered, had bird flu, a spokesman for the World Health Organisation (WHO) said earlier today, Friday.
As this is the first confirmed case of bird flu in Bangladesh, it brings to 15 the total number of countries with recorded human infections of the deadly H5N2 avian flu virus.
WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told Reuters:
“The case was confirmed by CDC [US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] in Atlanta. It is the first in Bangladesh.”
The toddler became ill in January this year, and has since made a full recovery, said Hartl. Although the health authorities in Bangladesh reported the suspected case straight away, it took time for a sample from the baby to be sent and tested in the US, he said.
The Bangladeshi authorities found H5N1 in poultry for the first time in March last year, and have since destroyed about 2 million eggs and 2 million chickens, reported Reuters.
The virus has now spread to chickens, ducks and wild birds in virtually the whole country: it has been found in 47 of the country’s 64 districts.
Hartl said it was inevitable, once the disease became endemic in birds, that it would one day infect a human, but it was still important to control it in the bird population to reduce the chance of human infection.
Bangladesh is a poor country of around 150 million people with a growing poultry industry that has been hard hit by these events.
According to Bangladeshi government figures reported by the BBC, the culling has resulted in losses totalling 60 million US dollars and more than 1.5 million workers have lost their jobs.
Experts believe that it is only a matter of time before H5N1, which is mutating all the time, transforms into a strain that can spread easily among humans and kills millions of people worldwide. At the moment humans can only catch it by handling infected birds, and even then, it is quite hard to become infected.
However, the Bangladeshi health authorities are mystified as to how the little boy caught the virus because he lives in a densely populated slum area of the capital Dhaka, far away from poultry farms, said a BBC reporter in Dhaka.
According to WHO, until this most recent confirmed case, the latest global figures for bird flu infections in humans, updated at the end of April, showed 14 countries have had confirmed reports of bird flu in humans since 2003. The global total of human cases is 382 (now 383), of whom 241 have died.
Sources: Reuters India, WHO, BBC.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD