"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)