DHAKA (Reuters) - Bangladesh said on Thursday a childinfected with bird flu, the country's first reported human caseof the virus, had recovered.

"The child was found infected by H5N1 but after treatmenthe has recovered and is now doing well," Mahmudur Rahman,director of the Dhaka-based Institute of Epidemiology andDisease Control and Research, told Reuters.

He said the case was detected recently during a routinecheck-up, but did not give details.

Bird flu was first detected in Bangladesh in March lastyear, and since then the authorities have culled around 2million chickens and destroyed more than 2 million eggs.

Avian influenza has spread through 47 of Bangladesh's 64districts causing losses of about 45 billion taka ($650million) to the growing poultry sector, which accounts for 1.6percent of the impoverished nation's gross domestic product.

But there had been no report of further spread of the virusin the country since early April this year.

About 60 percent of the country's more than 150,000 poultryfarms have been closed, making more than 1.5 million peoplejobless.

Experts fear the H5N1 strain could mutate or combine withthe highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark apandemic, especially in countries such as Bangladesh wherepeople live in close proximity to backyard poultry.

The virus rarely infects people, but there have been 382human cases worldwide since 2003, including 241 deaths,according to the World Health Organisation.

(Reporting by Nizam Ahmed, Masud Karim and Ruma Paul;Editing by Anis Ahmed and Alex Richardson)