They’re calling the statue Nino Cero  – Little Boy Zero.

Modelled on the famous Mannekin Pis statue in Brussels, its subject is a five-year-old lad... a real one who lives barely five minutes walk from his bronze likeness in the remote mountain village of La Gloria in Mexico .

Edgar Hernandez has been identified as the first person in the world known to have contracted the H1N1 virus – better known as swine flu.

This spring, it seemed half of La Gloria were coming down with something. One villager described how the sickness swept through the village.

She said: “Some people started getting ill in February and an eight-month-old baby died. After that another baby died on 21 March. Suddenly, most of the village got ill.

We asked the authorities what it was and they said it was a severe cold. They said influenza had been eradicated from Mexico.”

A week later, little Edgar woke with a high fever and headache. Doctors from the village clinic dismissed it as a common cold, but after he continued to deteriorate, medical staff from the local government came to the Hernandez home to take saliva samples.

On April 27, his mother Maria was informed Edgar had the H1N1 virus. 

His parents confess they have no idea how their little boy might have contracted it. They own no livestock or pets and have no contact with the many pig farms in the area. 

Edgar’s father, also Edgar, is a brickie. Maria is also confused as to how her child could be the catalyst for a global pandemic.

She said: “Some people are saying my boy is to blame for everyone getting sick. I don’t believe that.”

Edgar has since made a full recovery but the virus has gone on to claim around 1,000 lives in 34 countries.  Back in La Gloria itself, some look to the unveiling of the statue of Nino Cero as an opportunity to make a tourist buck off the back of a global health crisis.

But not everyone is so happy about the village basking in the title of the birthplace of swine flu.

Some residents believe the statue has no place there at all.“They are calling us ‘Muertos de Hambre,’” a local teenager told Mexican reporters last week – Mexican slang for dirty and worthless.

And the little boy dubbed swine flu patient zero is not overkeen on his new celebrity status either. 

Now fully fit again, Edgar just wants to get on with being a five-year old. “I was in bed and I couldn’t play in the street with my friends...but now I’m fine.”

But the statue’s sculptor Bernardo Luis Artasanchez, was up-beat about his work. He declared: “It portrays a child who was cured and who represents the union of all Mexicans.

“Never have so many people come to this community for a fair or a concert. And if more people come to La Gloria because of the statue, I will be the proudest man on earth.”

Of the frog that Boy Zero clutches in his right hand, Bernardo says: “It characterises the virus as one of the seven plagues of Egypt.

“Edgar, with his innocence and nobility, has dominated that which at first was bad but in the end was benign.”