I think it's helpful to remember that whatever happens to XMRV in relation to ME patients, XMRV is a very big story anyway.
It seems that XMRV is a man-made retrovirus, that contaminates labs all over the world, thus placing lab workers at risk of infection and vaccines at risk of contamination. This seems like a newsworthy story in itself. It's interesting that the newspapers aren't reporting this as a story in itself.
I've been doing some reading overnight, and things were not quite as I had thought there were.
Yes, there's been a partial retraction of the Science paper, and yes the BWG results were a failure.
But Judy's position has not changed massively.
I read the science article last night, and found that it is the best source of info so far.
It's a massive read (eight pages of A4), but the first three pages are very helpful.
I read it before I went to sleep, and I've totally forgotten all the details now, but Judy is still virus hunting and I
think she believes that a very similar virus to XMRV is involved. I need to re-read it.
Here's some links that I've found for the science article.
http://www.mecfsforums.com/index.php?topic=9569.0
This link spits up the article, so you have to click on the subsequent links to read it all:
http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/S...m&bn=27865&tid=458900&mid=458900&tof=23&off=1
And this appears to be a PDF download:
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&so...XPzYgB&usg=AFQjCNHfoe0s4ppH8CnEnk5Z3Ivi-arg9Q
And here's an interesting post from villagelife on another thread:
http://phoenixrising.me/forums/showthread.php?13830-The-real-story-about-XMRV-coming-out-today
I saw this on facebook.....
(thanks to Lilly Meehan)
The big news that is lost in all the press about the BWG is that Silverman admitted that his lab had likely contaminated his part of the Lombardi study - which were the full sequences that he identified as XMRV and prompted the authors to use the term XMRV in the first place. Yet the rest of the Lombardi paper stands, as do findings by other labs of MLV-related viruses (MRVs) in CFS patients. The huge significance of this is that all this time researchers were looking for the wrong virus, when in reality patients from the Lombardi study had something similar but still distinct from XMRV. This helps explain both the negative studies and, likely, the BWG Phase III results. What we need the research community to do now is focus on sequencing isolates from patient blood all over again, to find out what virus or viruses many of us REALLY have.
So if this is correct, it seems that it's possible that the
full sequences or isolate/s in the Science paper were due to contamination, but that the other findings in the Science paper were not due to contamination.
This
could explain why there have been such disparate and mixed results all this time, with so many researchers unable to detect XMRV. Everyone was chasing the full isolates, which only exist as contamination.
So there is something there that Judy is detecting, but it might not be XMRV after all.
It's all really mind boggling. This could mean that Judy is
not now chasing XMRV, but looking for similar viruses.
I'm not sure how convincing I find it all yet - it's too early to say.
From what I was led to believe earlier, there are still positive studies to be announced this weekend. But I'm not sure how significant these will be seen to be, now that there's been a partial retraction, and the BWG results were negative. And we are expecting Judy to present at this conference, so I expect that she will tell us what her position is and update us with her current research.