This morning I was reading some posts on Facebook and saw that some new information regarding XMRV & ME/CFS has been published by the Wall Street Journal but unfortunately – again – it isn’t good news for us CFS patients. Ever since news broke last year regarding the XMRV, the xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, being found in ME/CFS patients, there have been different studies that have said that the virus is not in CFS patients. Now the CDC is saying the same thing, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, including NIH infectious-disease specialist Harvey Alter, recently finished research that came to a conclusion similar to that of the Science paper—that XMRV, or xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, is found in the blood of chronic-fatigue syndrome patients.
The paper was accepted for publication in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America but is on hold, according to Ashley Truxon, media coordinator for the journal. She had no further comment.
Separately, scientists at the CDC, led by microbiologist William Switzer, concluded in a paper in another journal, Retrovirology, that they couldn’t find XMRV in the blood of people with chronic-fatigue syndrome, according to people familiar with the situation.
What is unusual is how this whole situation is the “hold” from what I am gathering from the reading and from what others are discussing. The article goes on to say that:
Publication of results is considered a critical part of the scientific process, and researchers familiar with the situation said they were puzzled by the move. It is unusual for a paper to be held after it has already gone through the formal peer-review process and been accepted for publication, say scientists who publish frequently.
“It’s fair to say it’s not a usual kind of thing,” said John M. Coffin, a special adviser to the National Cancer Institute and a professor at Tufts University in Boston who wrote an editorial alongside the Science report in October.
We all know, however, what it has been like over the last 20 years with the CDC and CFS. They have never taken us seriously and I’m sure this is just another reason for them not to. Does anyone think they are going to try hard to find a XMRV and if they do, will we ever really know it? What are your thoughts?
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