Some transcript snippets
When was this recorded? She says that 'the virus' has been identified in two different centres in the US and that no-one has yet been able to isolate it from blood samples. I think she is refering to just prostate XMRV at this point.
She states that, although the Irish, the Swedish and the Germans aren't finding XMRV in prostate cancer, that "we are actually finding it, I have to say". She says that it's not a lab contamination in either the US or the UK.
She goes on to say that XMRV is a simple virus, only having three genes, and that none of these are oncogenic (cancer causing). The theory could be, therefore, that the infection causes inflammation and it's the inflammatory response that leads to cancer.
The epidemiology is important because both the UK and Japan have found the virus in 1% and 1.7% of the population respectively.
And then they move on to CFS.... which she says they got into accidentally. They were approached by "people at Kings College London who have a cohort of chronic fatigue patients" and that "this is not a disease that we have any expertise in or that we work on". The 'people at Kings' asked if they'd test some samples and so sent blood from "people who had been very sick with chronic fatigue and we tested it with our assay which was highly sensitive...and we didn't find any evidence for the infection".
The interviewer says "and you published to some controversy" and "There is a bit of an industry here suggesting that retroviruses cause chronic fatigue syndrome".
McClure replies: "For us it was just a couple of weeks work. It was not our mainstream interest.... but the reason that we rushed into print with this..... was that we had some evidence .... that people were being offered this test .... and much, much worse than that that patients were being offered antiretroviral therapy, the kind of therapy that you would give HIV patients......." and "....so we wanted to put a stop to that because we felt it wasn't ethical."
The interviewer then says it looks like there's no cause and effect. In fact, the virus isn't there at all.
McClure says "I can't say that because all we have done is to test 186 chronic fatigue patients. I mean, we could be in the same position as the Americans are with their prostate cancer - they're the only ones who can find an association so far, until we publish anything that we might find, so we can't say that - because, as the American group, Lombardi's group, has pointed out ad nauseum to people, we are not testing the same patients as they have so.... "
And did the announcer really say that XMRV has managed to 'weasel' its way into humans?