Invest in ME Newsletter for October 2009
"The news we had been awaiting since May was finally announced. The research on a novel virus to which Dr. Judy Mikovits alluded at 4th Invest in ME International ME/CFS Conference in May, in answer to a question from Hillary Johnson, has been published by Science magazine.
The researchers at the Whittemore-Peterson Institute (WPI), together with the Cleveland Clinic and the National Cancer Institute have reported that 67% of 101 ME patients tested positive for infection with xenobiotic murine retrovirus (XMRV), a gammaretrovirus associated with a subset of prostate cancer. Only 3.7% of 218 healthy subjects tested were positive for the virus.
People with CFS are 54 times more likely to be infected with XMRV than your average person on the street - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmrv]
The implications here that ME is indeed an infectious disease could be far reaching.
Yet the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) knew of the possible retrovirus link back in 1991 when Elaine De Freitas presented research on this.
The CDC failed to act - much as the UK MRC have failed to act in all the years despite the scandal of suffering being caused to tens of thousands of severely ill people.
Predictably some of those who continue to portray the illness as a somatoform condition have immediately tried to diminish the research - an obvious sign that those vested interests which have dominated research funding from the MRC for so long are worried that their cash cow is about to be culled by good science.
More details - click here.
Statement by Invest in ME on the WPI research - click here.
Read Hillary Johnson's view of this news - click here."
'Dr Crippen' (who spookily seems to share Dr Michael Fitzpatrick views on M.E.) doesn't seem to have done his homework on the science of this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/20/me-debate
Is he (or she) aware that there may be a link between xmrv and autism?