CAIRO—A four-year-old Egyptian boy has tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus, becoming the 37th human case in the Arab country, the official Middle East News Agency reported on Saturday.
It quoted a health ministry statement identifying the boy as Emad Mohamed el-Daramalli from the Upper Egypt province of Qena.
He was admitted to hospital in Qena on Thursday suffering high fever after being exposed to birds suspected of having bird flu, MENA qouted the ministry as saying. He was taken to a hospital in the capital Cairo and is in a stable condition.
Fifteen of Egypt's bird flu cases have proven fatal.
Daramalli is the third human bird flu case from Qena over the past month after a lull of nearly two months. Egyptian officials had said they expected the virus to lie low during the hot summer, following the pattern it set last year after the initial outbreak in February 2006.
Bird flu did extensive damage to the country's poultry industry and the economy as a whole after its arrival in Egypt, which has more confirmed bird flu cases among humans than any other country outside of Asia.
Most of those who have fallen ill in Egypt were reported to have had contact with sick or dead household birds, primarily in northern Egypt where the weather is cooler than in the south.
Around five million households in Egypt depend on poultry as a main source of food and income and the government has said this makes it unlikely the disease can be eradicated.
The government still finds it hard to enforce restrictions on the movement and sale of live poultry.
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