Schoolboy archer survives after friend shoots an arrow through his eye

A schoolboy archer cheated death after he was shot through the eye by a friend.

The arrow went through 11-year-old Liu Cheong's eye socket, completely through his head and was only stopped by the back of his skull.

He only survived because the arrow had miraculously missed his brain.
Surgeons spent four hours removing the 16in arrow which had sunk more than four inches into the boy's head. They had to break off part of it just to get him in the CT scanner.

The teammate who shot him - a 13-year-old girl called Yan Shin - is being treated for shock.

Teachers at Jiutai City school in China said they believed the youngsters were practicing on their own when the accident happened.
'If the arrow had been shot with just a bit more force, it would have come out the back of his head,' doctors at Jida Hospital in Changchun, eastern China said.

After brain scans and x-rays, doctors began to cut away parts of his skull to remove the arrow without damaging optic nerves or brain tissue.

His parents have been warned he still faces a risk of infection and may need further operations.

'It is a miracle he survived the accident,' said one medic.

HIV vaccine likely due in five years

A therapeutic vaccine to treat HIV infection is likely to be developed within five years, said Nobel Prize laureate in medicine Luc Montagnier .

"I think it is not impossible to do it within a few years," he told a news conference together with Francoise Barre-Sinoussi. The two French scientists shared half of this year's Nobel Prize for medicine for discovering the virus of AIDS. The other half goes to a German scientist for finding the cause of cervical cancer.

The 76-year-old director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention said that his colleagues had been working on such vaccine for a decade, but he did not elaborate as to why he believed it can be developed in "four to five years".

"Our job, of course, is to find complementary treatment to eradicate the infection," he said.