Maria Cheng Sure Quotations

Our office in Beijing was informed of this today. It is in a province that hasn't identified human cases before but it is somebody who seems to have a history of exposure to poultry.

It is possible that they all had common exposure to sick poultry but it is also possible there may have been human to human transmission. We don't have enough information to draw a hypothesis either way.

I'm not sure we've seen a cluster like this in terms of numbers and certainly it's a concern. Is the virus being transmitted more easily from birds to humans, or even from humans to humans? We need to put all the pieces together before we can come to conclusions.

We are planning to tap into the polio network to pass on public education measures about bird flu.

We'd like to see all these cases investigated rapidly so that we can determine what the mode of transmission was, what the source of exposure was, and whether or not there were any characteristics of the situation that are different from what we've seen in Asia.