San Francisco Chronicle (SF) - FRIDAY, July 28, 1995 Edition: FINAL Section: News Page: A12 Word Count: 459
Charles Petit, Chronicle Science Writer

Despite the discovery that the unusual case stemmed from very special circumstances, microbiologist Irvin S.Y. Chen of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine said continued study of the boy, now 5 years old, and his mother may still help in the fight against AIDS. The boy's mother remains infected by the mutant, crippled virus but has shown no symptoms of AIDS.

Chen was in San Francisco this week for the 9th International Congress of Immunology, where he discussed the baby's case.

He was an author of a widely publicized report in late March that said the infected infant had done what no person had ever been confirmed to have done before: fight off and eliminate the HIV virus after an infection was established.

Although many people live 10 years or longer in good outward health after HIV infection, all who have been studied -- except this baby -- have been found to carry the virus, which wages a constant war against their immune systems.

"We suspected, even when we made the report, that the virus might be crippled or weak," Chen said, "but we weren't sure."

Since then, he said, cultures of the virus, obtained from the mother, confirmed its unusual frail nature.

The mother was HIV positive before the boy was born, and tests after his birth confirmed that he too had become infected. However, a year later, batteries of tests had failed to find any trace of it. Chen said the case leaves many questions unanswered, such as how the baby fought the virus even in its weakened form. Newborns have incomplete immune systems and rely for disease resistance largely on antibodies remaining in their bloodstreams from their mothers for several weeks to months after birth.

Most of the study now shifts to the mother, he said. If tests show that the weakened virus had endowed her with a heightened resistance to further infection, while not posing a threat of AIDS, she may provide clues helpful for producing AIDS vaccines.

Even if the virus she carries is weak now, Chen added, HIV viruses mutate so fast there is always a danger it will revert to a more virulent form. Presumably, he said, her strain of virus is descended from just such an aggressive version, but somehow lost or altered part of its genetic code when she became infected. Simply using her viral strain as a vaccine would not work, he said, because of the high possibility it would mutate back into a deadly form.

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