By Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal
Earlier this week, an FDA advisory panel recommended that the agency bar people who report a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome from donating blood amid concerns about a possible link with the virus XMRV.
But reliably testing potential blood donors or people with CFS for XMRV isn’t yet possible.
That’s the conclusion from the latest phase of an ongoing study launched by the HHS Blood XMRV Scientific Working Group, which was set up last year after a paper in Science linked XMRV to CFS. An update on the study was presented to the FDA advisory panel and again today on a webinar sponsored by the CFIDS Association of America, a patient advocacy group.
Many groups are racing to develop an XMRV test in case it turns out that potential blood donors need to be screened for XMRV. But in a presentation on today’s webinar by Graham Simmons of Blood Systems Research Institute, the lab that has been coordinating the working group studies, one of the slides summed it up: Participating Labs — Discordant Results.
The first phase of the study evaluated the performance of XMRV tests developed by a number of labs, including ... Read more>>
No comments:
Post a Comment