Unless you have evidence of any prospect of ME/CFS ever being researched at levels commensurate with the numbers of people affected and the seriousness of the condition - which is to say, annual budgets in the hundreds of millions rather than the hundreds of thousands - then XMRV remains our best hope for research, even now. And if XMRV hasn't raised any awareness in the scientific community of the seriousness and prevalence of ME/CFS, and of the well-documented immune abnormalities involved, then I don't know what could.
Completely disagree with that view. With so little research funding available, that's precisely why it should go into more promising lines of research, some of which I outlined above, avenues that Gordon Broderick are taking, etc. Not wild goose chases for a retrovirus that almost no one but the original researchers can find.
How many papers show XMRV positive?
Now how many show XMRV negative?
A little bit lopsided, isn't it?
So in essence it is really is either/or, b/c w/ so little out there, the more that goes to dubious XMRV claims the less that goes to the actual biological causes, the effects of which are already known to exist in patient after patient, replicated in study after study (NK function, cytotoxic function, TH1/TH2 imbalance, etc.)
I remember when the benevolent "molly" and her cohort (whose name I forget ATM) were here pushing stem cells: she was "cured" with them, she can get a "special rate," only $10,000, etc. I get the same feeling here. Someone's getting the money, and who is getting the results? No one in the CFS community that I can see. We're being led around by our noses b/c a questionable study that is now all but retracted probably had some contaminated samples and ran with it. Didn't hurt them financially at all, did it? But whomever shelled out 10 grand for stem cells for little to no benefit now has 10 grand less for any future potential therapies.
Sorry, but the entire thing seems like a scam to me. Maybe not originally intentional, but perhaps a little sketchy in its perpetuation.