Nasser al-Sayyed said on Monday tests confirmed that a two-year-old girl, who lives outside Cairo, had contracted the deadly H5N1 virus. The girl was admitted to a Cairo hospital for treatment and is currently in a stable condition.
The girl is believed to have contracted the virus from domestic poultry kept at the family home.
The latest report takes the number of people in Egypt who have developed the virus to 52, since the first case was recorded in 2006. Some 23 people have died.
Last year during an international bird flu conference at Egypt's resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, the country's health minister said that Egypt would need some $2.2 billion to deal with avian flu over the next three years.
According to the World Health Organization, avian influenza has so far killed 243 people out of a total 387 confirmed cases worldwide.
Although there have been no incidences of human to human infection, experts fear that it may mutate into a form that could easily be transmitted from person to person, causing a global pandemic.
