Too early to call re Pakistani human to human transmission

Link: Effect Measure : Now I'm the one complaining about WHO (again).

The World Health Organisation on Friday ruled out any mutation of the potentially fatal H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus after a case of inter-human transmission of bird flu may have been detected in Pakistan.     "There is no suggestion that the virus has changed into a form that poses a broader risk," WHO spokesman John Rainford told AFP. "If that had been the case, we would have witnessed more cases of human transmission."     Rainford said that the genetic sequencing of the virus involved in the latest case was being continued. (Agence France Presse)

What's wrong with this? Suppose (for the sake of argument) it takes two changes to turn a virus into one that "poses a broader risk" and only one has occurred in this case. We wouldn't know this by seeing if there were more cases. We would only know this if we looked at the sequence and further, we knew what to look for (which two changes to track). It isn't clear that the viral sequence in this case has been examined completely (and we hope that when it is examined, the sequence will be deposited immediately into a publicly accessible database like GenBank). It is also quite clear we don't know what to look for, so a categorical statement that "a mutation" has been "ruled out" isn't true and cannot be true at this point.