HIV and ID Observations

February 7th, 2012

Chronic Fatigue: Is There Hope After XMRV?

I’ve been following the chronic fatigue/XMRV story from the start, which was compelling for several reasons, including: A potential cause was identified of a very debilitating, mysterious illness. Lots of very smart ID people (including some of my colleagues) studied it. Media coverage, notably from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, was particularly […]

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June 2nd, 2011

Original XMRV/CFS Paper Almost, Sort-of Retracted by Science

From the pages of Science In this week’s edition of Science Express, we are publishing two Reports that strongly support the growing view that the association between XMRV and CFS described by Lombardi et al. likely reflects contamination of laboratories and research reagents with the virus … Because the validity of the study by Lombardi et al. is […]

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November 4th, 2010

XMRV and CFS: More Yay and Nay

Does XMRV cause Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?  Or more accurately, is it even associated with CFS? I’ve been putting off writing about this for a while, as I knew colleagues of mine had a paper in press on the topic, and I wanted the dust to settle a bit more on the controversy. But of course the controversy, […]

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October 17th, 2009

Is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Another Retroviral Disease?

Here’s a surprising report in Science: Studying peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from CFS patients, we identified DNA from a human gammaretrovirus, xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV), in 68 of 101 patients (67%) compared to 8 of 218 (3.7%) healthy controls … These findings raise the possibility that XMRV may be a contributing factor […]

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