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Reagent Contamination Study

eric_s

Senior Member
Messages
1,925
Location
Switzerland/Spain (Valencia)
I seem to remember that many recent attempts to link a new virus with disease have foundered on replicability. PCR is so sensitive to tiny perturbations in research methods that it is impossible to finally prove the existance of a virus one way or the other in samples. It is easy to block research if you demand an impossible standard of proof. The best that you can do is to establish liklihood and continue your hypothesis by doing clinical trials, as JM wants to do.

This is how medicine has been done for centiries. So why the outcry when she wants to see if her (willing) patients get better?

At the Invest in ME conference the WPI were confident and happy. JM did not look like a woman with doubts to me. She can take her opponents criticisms' in her stride.
But there might also be dangers in this. What if XMRV really was the cause of ME/CFS, but things are, for whatever reason, a bit more complicated, so that just giving ARVs won't lead to recovery. Or only very slowly. And they did a trial and the results would not be very good. Then they might be in even bigger trouble.
 
Messages
646
I'm afraid that is a pretty bad non sequitur.

It certainly is ! "Massive amounts more porcine virus DNA", would have been 'sequitur'. And if one wants to be literal - allow that both child and pig have abrasions which facilitates blood to blood contact. The point is humans live in a world of microbes and microbial fragments, that doesn't mean that we should be complacent about health risks from the technology of health interventions but we have to be pragmatic in the way we move forward. No one cared about pig or mouse DNA when the challenge was ridding the world of small pox, now that we can track not just microbes but fragments of them, and the diseases on the target list are, at least for the present, of more limited danger, a more dilligent appraoch can be taken toward the microscopic integrity of vaccines. Nevertheless that is still a 'luxury' position available only to wealthy countries, in the case of rotorvirus it causes illness in millions and uncalculable numbers of deaths in children every year in third world countries.

IVI
 

Jemal

Senior Member
Messages
1,031
But there might also be dangers in this. What if XMRV really was the cause of ME/CFS, but things are, for whatever reason, a bit more complicated, so that just giving ARVs won't lead to recovery. Or only very slowly. And they did a trial and the results would not be very good. Then they might be in even bigger trouble.

Let's be honest, if XMRV is proven to be the cause of ME/CFS, I don't think we will make speedy recoveries. Only a small amount of people are taking ARV's, but the results have been a mixed bag, so far. XMRV is probably a slowly replicating virus and the ARV's hit the virus when it tries replicating. On a fast replicating virus like HIV this has effect, but not so much on XMRV I guess. Also, the current ARV's are made for HIV and not XMRV. So improvements might take a long while and recoveries will probably take much longer (if even possible - the virus itself is probably there to stay for life and maybe there's damage that cannot be undone). Also I am sure that if it was proven that XMRV causes ME/CFS tomorrow, our doctors would not start handing out ARV's the next day...

What could improve is the way the medical society has been treating us: we might be taken more seriously if it's proven a retrovirus causes our disease. It could also open us up for further abuse though. People are scared of retroviruses and might become scared of us.
 

eric_s

Senior Member
Messages
1,925
Location
Switzerland/Spain (Valencia)
I don't know if you misunderstood me or if i'm misunderstanding you now. I'm a bit shot to pieces right now.

My "fear" was that a clinical trial with bad results could move us further away from proving XMRV is the cause of ME/CFS, even it it was the cause. It could be further ammunition for the critics/skeptics/non-believers/denialists, how ever one likes to call them. So maybe better rally prove the association first, by spreading the knowledge to more groups, like it has already happened with IrsiCaixa, Bieger, Maureen Hanson and maybe others. If association is proven, a failed clinical trial would have less bad consequences, probably.

So i don't understand the "proven" in your first sentence at the moment.

What i do believe is that if causation was proven, ARVs would be prescribed immediately.
 

Jemal

Senior Member
Messages
1,031
I don't know if you misunderstood me or if i'm misunderstanding you now. I'm a bit shot to pieces right now.

My "fear" was that a clinical trial with bad results could move us further away from proving XMRV is the cause of ME/CFS, even it it was the cause. It could be further ammunition for the critics/skeptics/non-believers/denialists, how ever one likes to call them. So maybe better rally prove the association first, by spreading the knowledge to more groups, like it has already happened with IrsiCaixa, Bieger, Maureen Hanson and maybe others. If association is proven, a failed clinical trial would have less bad consequences, probably.

So i don't understand the "proven" in your first sentence at the moment.

What i do believe is that if causation was proven, ARVs would be prescribed immediately.

I think I misunderstood ;)

Anyway, XMRV is facing some mayor issues at the moment...
 

eric_s

Senior Member
Messages
1,925
Location
Switzerland/Spain (Valencia)
That's for sure. Something that just came to my mind... In Science today they said serum attacks the virus which would make a human infection unlikely. Well, it can infect monkeys, that's probably pretty certain. So why not humans? Now let's assume it can infect humans. But most teams can't find it in the blood. Might that be because it can't survive in the blood very well and so you need to know very well how and where to look to find it in the blood? Maybe they just explained the reason for their own failure? This has no scientific value of course, it was just an uneducated thought.