Prof Racaniello: chronic fatigue syndrome is an infectious disease

By DAVID TULLER
Published: June 1, 2011, nytimes.com:

Dr. Vincent Racaniello, a microbiology professor at Columbia University, said in an interview that it now appeared unlikely that XMRV infection is a cause of chronic fatigue syndrome. But it also would be wrong to conclude that chronic fatigue syndrome is not an infectious disease, he added.

“These patients have a lot of signs of hyper-immune activation, with their immune systems firing almost constantly,” he said.

Dr. Jay Levy, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the senior author of one of the new studies, said he nonetheless believed that many or most people with chronic fatigue syndrome are suffering from a disease initiated by one or more viruses.

Many of the disease’s symptoms are likely caused by the immune systems’ response to an infection, rather than to the pathogens themselves, he said. Read more>>