Yo, headline writer -- it's "fatigue," not "fatique." Fatique sounds like a fake French-sounding name for an athlete or something...

That should be CFS not CSF

nutcases have cfs. my sister is neurotic and flaky. she claims to have fibro, ibs and cfs.

Get them to a shrink, doubt that even helps

I'm  curious to know how such a concerted effort has been made to dismiss the findings of the the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI),  and the findings of the National institute of health NIH and the FDA who also found a variety oft he Retro virus XMRV , and in about the same proportion to the WPI's findings. 

These studies claiming contamination have not been fully vetted in the research community. First they publish, then discuss, and then decide, or not. Further, there is conjecture and supposition in the research which is not necessarily relevant to what has been found in other studies. The question of XMRV etc. is far from over. 

The science is far more complex then this report suggests. And there are no dissenting opinions reported here either. There are plenty available. This is more of the junk reporting that has been the norm in the media for the last couple of decades. 

At best this is bad journalism at worst it sends a messages to people not unlike   bob-25626236 who do not understand and seems to gain joy in making fun of a family member who is most likely so sick she can't refute him,  thus the half truths, innuendo, and out right deceptions infiltrate our culture. 

Hey Bob. This is a deadly disease that is contagious. Most of the world will not let people with ME/CFS donate blood. Sure hope you don't get it. 

Blessings.

Rev. Allyson K. Day

Just 1 of the world wide 17, 000 000  ME/CFS sufferers.  For 24 years.

Even if your sister doesn't really have CFS, it's heartless to say such things about everyone suffering from this.

Your sister huh? If I had a brother like you...I would probably need a shrink....you are heartless.

Anyone who has actually read the four papers in Retrovirology, will realize that they do not settle the debate.

Dr Coffin, one of the co-authors of the aforementioned studies stated that none of today’s published papers ”definitively show that any prior study is wrong”.

(see the WSJ article XMRV: Raising the Issue of Contamination)

The WSJ article also stated the following, from the author of the editorial published in Retrovirology: "Smith pointed out that some of the previous papers on prostate cancer found XMRV integrated into the patients’ DNA and ”I can’t come up with a mechanism where there would be contamination there.”

The papers present contradictory evidence on where they think the likely source of contamination is. Secondly, in one of the papers, the newly suggested the IAP assay, which is used to test for mouse DNA contamination actually detected such in 50% of samples that were negative for MLV/XMRV. This could suggest that the IAP assay itself has a high false positive rate. Or that lab is contaminating the samples after their initial testing, which would be rather ironic.

Eric Klein, Cleveland Clinic: " We have reported XMRV integration in fresh frozen prostate tissue taken directly from patients at radical prostatectomy that has never been put in tissue culture and believe this is solid evidence of authentic human infection . See Dong et al PNAS 2007 and Kim et al. J Virol 2008"

Here is a quote from Europe's most noted CFS doctor, Prof. Kenny De Meirleir

"The contamination by mouse material was excluded in our study, that of Lo and that of Lombardi et al. We are not using PCR as a basis of the test but human prostate cancer cells that do not express RNase L so the virus from patient's blood can grow in it. We also sequence the virus and I can assure you it is not mouse material. Governments and insurance companies are horrified by the idea that there is a new retrovirus out there that has infected 10 times more people than HIV up to date. My preliminary data show that the virus does not grow in culture anymore after Nexavir + GcMAF although the procedure was identical to the pretreatment culture. In the next months more will come from our side. A study with healthy blood donors, ME patients who got ill immediately after blood transfusion and ME patients who gave blood after they got ill will be published in the first half of 2011. What these 5 are doing to the patients is a crime against humanity. -- Kenny De Meirleir"

Statement from the Whittemore Peterson Institute regarding Retrovirology December 20,2010

by Whittemore Peterson Institute on Monday, December 20, 2010 at 9:13pm

The Lombardi et al. and Lo et al. studies were done using four different methods of detection. They were not simply PCR experiments, as were the studies by McClure et al. and others who have recently reported their difficulties with contamination. Experienced researchers such as Mikovits, Lombardi, Lo and their collaborators understand the limitations of PCR technology, especially the possibility of sample contamination. As a result, we and Lo et al. conducted rigorous studies to prevent and rule out any possibility that the results reported were from contamination. In addition to the use of PCR methodology, the Lombardi team used two other scientific techniques to determine whether, in fact, we had found new retroviruses in human blood samples. We identified a human antibody response to a gamma retroviral infection and we demonstrated that live gamma retrovirus isolated from human blood could infect human cells in culture. These scientific findings cannot be explained by contamination with mouse cells, mouse DNA or XMRV-related virus-contaminated human tumor cells. No mouse cell lines and none of the human cell lines reported today by Hue et al. to contain XMRV were ever cultured in the WPI lab where our PCR experiments were performed. Humans cannot make antibodies to viruses related to murine leukemia viruses unless they have been exposed to virus proteins. Therefore, recent publications regarding PCR contamination do not change the conclusions of the Lombardi et al. and Lo et al. studies that concluded that patients with ME/CFS are infected with human gammaretroviruses. We have never claimed that CFS was caused by XMRV, only that CFS patients possess antibodies to XMRV related proteins and harbor infectious XMRV, which integrates into human chromosomes and thus is a human infection of as yet unknown pathogenic potential.

"The coauthors stand by the conclusions of Lombardi et al. Nothing that has been published to date refutes our data." Judy A. Mikovits

Here is a quote from the bigwig NIH viral-hunter, Ian Lipkin:

"These papers emphasize the pitfalls of molecular assays and raise concerns. Nonetheless, it is premature to rule out XMRV or related viruses as factors in prostate cancer or CFS. Links have also been made based on serology and the presence of viral proteins as well as of viral sequences. Thus, we still need appropriately powered, rigorous blinded studies of well characterized patients and controls. One such study is underway under the auspices of the National Institutes Health.
Ian"

Here is real piece of journalism by Amy Marcus of the Wall St. Journal
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/12/20/xmrv-raising-the-issue-of-contamination/

On Monday five papers were published consecutively in Retrovirology, a pay to publish paper, which showed only that the labs that produced the papers had contamination, and were unable to find the new human retrovirus, XMRV.

Dr. Jamie Deckoff-Jones, on her blog X Rx, said today "Nothing has been said of value in those five papers, except that future studies will have to be done carefully and that the authors are running sloppy labs."

The Cleveland Clinic, the National Institute of Health, Cornell University, the Whittemore Peterson Institute, the Federal Drugs Administration and the National Cancer Institute all have labs that can detect this family of Murine Leukemia related RetroViruses. Would such prestigious labs not take great care in their testing procedures?

The labs finding the virus, unlike the labs producing the papers published last Monday, used antibody, culture, and two other methods. The labs that say it is all contamination used PCR alone.

See the retraction of a similar article by Dr Vincent Raciniello, here:http://www.virology.ws/2010/12/22/xmrv-and-cfs-its-not-the-end/

I am terribly disappointed with MSN. Your article is full of utterly false and misleading information.

The studies did NOT find contamination in any previous study. As the virologist Vincent Racanielo stated yesterday, " My conclusion is that these four papers point out how identification of XMRV from human specimens [done by PCR alone] can be complicated by contamination, but they do not mean that previous studies were compromised."

Given the complete inaccuracy of your article, I will no longer be reading MSN "news." What an embarrassment to so-called journalism.

Funnily the scientist in those 4 papers do not agree with that press release. Looks like an attempt at propaganda to me. And what about prostate cancer? Thats is also linked to this retrovirus.