"I have no idea why the test turned out to be negative", said
Wen Congcheng, a villager from Chuanying District of Jilin City,
who had tested positive for HIV in 2001.
Yet this purported miracle happened this year when the man
underwent his regular test at the First Clinical Hospital of Beihua
University only to receive a negative result. The same results
appeared in additional lab tests conducted by four different
domestic hospitals Wen visited to ensure his recovery was
genuine.
If the tests made no mistakes, Wen would be the first Chinese
HIV patient to ever make a full recovery, People's Daily
reported. "I can not tell exactly how I feel. I can only tell that
I still get tired as usual," said Wen.
Rare recovery from this fatal immune disease occurred once with
a British patient named Andrew Stimpson in 2002. The test results
came back negative 14 months after the man had first been diagnosed
HIV-positive, yet the case has been clouded by suspicions of false
clinical tests.
The same uncertainty also lingers in Wen's case, as doctors are
unsure if there were any mistakes made during the man's HIV tests.
"It is still early to say his negative result will last," said Lang
Ying, Deputy Director of the Disease Control and Prevention Center
in Chuanying Distrcit.
Moreover, experts believe more research should be done on Wen's
case to verify the validity of the results. Liu Baogui, former
director of the AIDS Sector of the Disease Control and Prevention
Center in Jilin City, said: "It seldom happens that the HIV
antibody test results change from positive to negative. Wen's case
is rare in the world, but I am sure it has nothing to do with the
medicines that the patient had taken for cure."
According to Liu, the center has had difficulty examining the
procedures of the clinical tests that the man received for his HIV
results.
(China.org.cn by Wu Jin December 3, 2007)