Three more districts of Bangladesh have been affected by the avian influenza, raising the number of affected districts to more than half of the country’s 64 districts.

According to officials, the three districts include Gopalganj, Sylhet and Mymensingh. Moreover, the port city of Chittagong was put on high alert after some dead crows tested positive for the H5N1, Reuters reported.

The government is already taking measures to prevent the bird flu from spreading, but the lack of awareness and extreme poverty among the farming and domestic poultry-owning community are two major reasons for which the action is not efficient.

“More than 200,000 volunteers are visiting rural households and educating people to report dead or sick birds, safe disposal of poultry waste and other safe health practices,” Mushtaque Ahmed, senior scientific officer at the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research said, according to Reuters.

These volunteers are also letting people know that touching a sick bird or eating it significantly raises the risk of becoming infected.

The good news is that Bangladesh authorities have not learnt of any human infection, but the bird flu can become risky, as some 4 million people are involved in poultry farming across the country. In addition, their ignorance of letting officials burn or buy the infected birds could become the point of a national pandemic.

So far, the H5N1 virus has killed more than 220 people globally since late 2003, Indonesia alone reporting 102 deaths from bird flu. Hundreds of millions of birds have been slaughtered over the past years.

According to recent reports, more outbreaks are being reported in Pakistan, Tibet, India, Myanmar, Thailand and other Asian countries.