Bangladesh reported on Thursday that a child infected with bird flu had recovered after treatment.

It was the country’s first human case since bird flu was first detected there in March last year. Mahmudur Rahman, director of the Dhaka-based Institute of Epidemiology and Disease Control and Research told Reuters that the boy “is now doing well.”

Bangladesh’s poultry industry is one of the world’s largest. The country has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of birds in recent months leading to the closure of more than 40 percent of the nation's farms and leaving the economy crippled. The virus was found in at least 47 of the country’s 64 districts. Therefore, more than half a million people were left unemployed.

Bird flu was also detected in neighboring India's West Bengal state earlier this year. No human cases have been detected there so far.

Health experts fear that H5N1 strain of bird flu could mutate into a form that could be spread among humans, threatening millions of people.

The bird flu virus began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003. According to the World Health Organization, there have been 382 human cases worldwide since 2003, 241 of them fatal. Indonesia is the hardest hit regions of all, with 108 of the deaths and is seen by health experts as a potential hotspot for a pandemic.