Monday, March 24, 2014

The contaminant XMRW is an infectious virus

@ American Society for Microbiology:

How can Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) contamination be prevented? Susceptibility of XMRV to alcohol-based disinfectants and its environmental stability

+Author Affiliations

Institute of Molecular Virology, Ulm University Medical Centre, Ulm, Germany

ABSTRACT

Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) represents a novel γ-retrovirus that is capable of infecting human cells and has been classified as BSL-2 organism. Hence XMRV represents a potential risk for personnel in laboratories worldwide. Here, we measured the stability of XMRV and its susceptibility to alcohol-based disinfectants. To this end, we exposed an infectious XMRV reporter virus encoding a secretable luciferase to different temperatures, pH values or disinfectants, and infected XMRV permissive Raji B cells to measure residual viral infectivity. We found that one minute treatment of XMRV particles at 60°C is sufficient to reduce infectivity by 99.9%. Maximum XMRV infectivity was obtained at a neutral pH but was reduced by 86% at pH 4 or 99.9% at pH 10. The common hand and surface disinfectants ethanol and isopropanol as well as the cell fixation reagent paraformaldeyhde abrogated XMRV infectivity entirely as indicated by a reduction of infectivity exceeding 99.99%. Our findings provide evidence-based means to inactivate XMRV. Their applications will help to prevent unintended XMRV contamination of cell cultures in laboratories and minimize the risk for laboratory personnel and healthcare workers to become infected with this biosafety level 2 organism.

FOOTNOTES

E-mail address: (jan.muench@uni-ulm.de)

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Hearing in Danish Parliament because Karina's health has been made much worse bij Psychiatric kidnapping

Fight over Diagnosis Leads to Hearing
Who decides if the cause of an illness is physical or
psychological?

Should psychiatrists have the right to incarcerate
patients and force psychological treatment if they
disagree with a physical diagnosis?

A dispute over the cause and treatment of a young
woman’s illness led to her being forcibly removed
from her parent’s care on Feb. 12, 2013.

The psychiatrists responsible for this claim she has
a mental illness (somatoform illness), while her
doctors and parents insist she has a physical
neurological illness called ME.

The Danish woman, Karina Hansen, is still
hospitalized against her will and forced to receive
treatments that have been proven to hurt ME
patients. (1)

Karina’s sister reports that Karina is much worse
than before she was hospitalized.

You can read Karina’s story here: http://bit.ly/1ohU9Bi
This heated conflict will now be discussed at an
official hearing at the Danish parliament on
March 19th in Copenhagen. (2)

The psychiatrists in charge of Karina work at The
Research Clinic for Functional Disorders and
Psychosomatics in Aarhus, Denmark. (3)

This clinic has created so much patient
dissatisfaction that 16 patient associations
requested that the clinic be investigated.
A hearing has now been called and Karina’s lawyer is
scheduled to make a presentation about her case.

Other speakers include doctors who are specialists
in conditions this clinic treats with purely
psychological methods.

These conditions include whiplash, fibromyalgia, IBS,
PMS, Chronic Pelvic Pain, etc.

A Danish Justina Pelletier?
Karina Hansen’s story has many parallels to the
story of American teenager Justina Pelletier.

Both girls were forcibly hospitalized in February last
year and both sets of parents were accused of
mistreating their daughter by following medical
advice from experts in the girls’ respective diseases.

Justina has mitochondrial disease.

In both cases, the psychiatrists in charge refused
to agree to a second opinion. And in both cases,
the human rights of the patient and the parents
have been completely ignored.

Justina’s story will be told on the Dr. Phil show on
March 17th. (4)

Karina’s case will be discussed at the open hearing
in the Danish parliament on March 19th.

The hearing will be streamed live and later posted
on Youtube.

The hearing will be in Danish, but an English
language statement about the hearing will be
released within a week from this source.

Rebecca Hansen - ME Association, Denmark -
reh@me-foreningen.dk

1)  http://bit.ly/1ivG8hH
2)  http://bit.ly/1qLLcm4
3)  http://bit.ly/1icP7nb
4)  http://exm.nr/1nxWJGz