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HONG KONG (Reuters) May 27 - Scientists in Hong Kong and mainland China have developed a vaccine for SARS that they will soon test on animals, a microbiologist on the team said on Tuesday.

Laboratories worldwide have been racing to find a cure and a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which has affected more than 8200 people around the world, killing 729 of them, since it emerged in southern China in November.

Guan Yi, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong, said the team will soon test the vaccine on monkeys.

"We cannot tell when the vaccine will be safe or effective in humans," he told Reuters.

He also could not say how long the experiments would take.

Guan said scientists had cultured the SARS virus in their laboratories and will kill, or inactivate, samples for the tests.

"We will then purify them to guarantee there is no live virus before testing them on animals. We will then see if the cultured virus will stimulate the production of antibodies," he added.

Experts have said it would take years before a SARS vaccine could be made commercially available, if at all.

If the virus is mutating rapidly, as some scientists argue, a vaccine could take a long time to develop, or might not be effective at all.

Scientists at the University of Hong Kong said last week that the SARS virus may have jumped to humans from the civet cat, a delicacy for centuries for many people in southern China.

Their tests showed that viruses found in the exotic animal were very similar to the coronavirus found in SARS patients.

A World Health Organization official later warned that it was too early to jump to firm conclusions that the civet cat was the definite reservoir for SARS.

But authorities in some parts of southern China have since renewed a crackdown on the sale and consumption of wild game, and Hong Kong has banned the import of civet cat meat.

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