Posted on 05/31/2003 6:30:11 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
BEIJING - China has found that some people infected with Sars did not show any symptoms and were not infectious after their bodies developed antibodies to fight the disease, state media said.
The findings by scientists in Heyuan city in southern China's Guangdong province adds further mystery to Sars, for which there is no known vaccine or cure.
The China News Service (CNS) said scientists concluded that the disease can be symptomless after studying people who had come in contact with Heyuan's first Sars case, a man identified by only his surname Huang.
Medical experts in Heyuan checked his family members, health workers who treated him and the doctor in his village, and conducted blood tests on five of them, CNS said. They found that some of the five people had the Sars virus in their blood but had not fallen ill, and had developed antibodies to fight the virus.
Chinese media had previously reported that a Heyuan man by the name of Huang Xingchu, who had worked in a restaurant that served wildlife dishes in Guangdong's Shenzhen city, was China's first documented case of Sars.
The scientists believe people who had developed antibodies for the Sars virus were not infectious.
However, more studies will have to be conducted to see if they were infectious before they developed the antibodies, the report said.
The report could not be immediately confirmed.
This is quite normal in the course of ANY disease. Some are always immune, or fight it off wthout outward symptoms. It's true of all regular infections, AIDS, SARS, cancer, etc. Even during the waves of Bubonic Plague in Europe there were those who survived unscathed.
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