Bird flu case may be first double jump
New York Times
May 24, 2006

Reacting to the death on Monday of an Indonesian man, the World Health Organization said yesterday that the case appeared to be the first example of the avian flu jumping from human to human to human.

But the health agency quickly cautioned that this did not necessarily mean that the virus had mutated into a strain that could start a pandemic by jumping rapidly between people as ordinary flu does.

It is a "definite possibility" that the virus jumped more than once inside a family cluster, said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the W.H.O. in Geneva. Although a second jump sounds alarming, "It doesn't look like the trend has changed," she said. "Each case was in very close contact with the previous one."

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