Hi Willow - any chance you could cite the source of Singh's comments on the CCC at all? That would be useful info if you're able to.
Also- Is Singh in any position to carry on with CFS research in the first place, now she's part of the shutting down push re XMRV in ME/CFS? Or is she making comforting clucking noises with no substance from a position of no further involvement? Genuine question.
There seems to be a lot of "CFS patients have got to realise the search goes on" type comments but this community knows only too well that the only explanations given support, money and time are the one that are the most implausible of all - the psychogenic explanations.
ADM quoted it in the WJS some time ago... this was before Singh suspected any contamination in her lab, right when Lipkin was announced as The One Who Would Solve It; she published a note telling him what constituted a well-qualified ME/CFS patient, which included CCC (might have been both Fukuda and CCC, but that renders Fukuda moot except as an anchor to recent recearch such as that of Klimas/Fletcher, PFL, the Lights...). There was a link either here at PR or at WSJ, and I read her exact words.
I have not heard Singh making any recent noise about the search going on. I'm just saying she doesn't belong with McClure (and I know it wasn't you, Angela, who said this), who would think CCC was preposterous (since it destroys any notion of CFS being on a continuum with normal fatigue and burnout, or being somehow closely related to primary depressive conditions--
please note these are important, deserving, devastating, and largely biomedical conditions, but they just aren't ME/CFS and should be diagnosed and studied separately in the best interest of everyone). Singh endorsing CCC clearly shows she is not in the psychogenic camp regardless of what she thinks of XMRV as eitiology.
There are too many people who tend to treat researchers as if XMRV=biomedical and no XMRV=no biomedical. No XMRV does not necessarily = not biomedical. No XMRV does not necessarily = not infectious. There are lots of other biomedical avenues and lots of other infectious agents (including more retroviral possibilities!).
Particularly, Singh signing off on XMRV does not make her in the McClure camp, and that was the point I was making. Singh did write some conclusions that overreached her data (just because it's not, in her opinion, XMRV, does not mean it's not some other retrovirus--there is some reason for the positive results and contamination introduced during processing just does not explain everything tidily... besides which there really is hardly anyone using ARVs and it's not necessary to warn people away from this because most of us are waiting for the science and wouldn't consider trying them prior to official clinical trials no matter how much we believed in any theory of retrovirus, unless that individual person had tried everything else
and was dying anyway, which some of us are!) but that doesn't mean she's stopped believing that ME/CFS is real. I see no indication that she has, and I think it's grossly unfair to class her with McClure.
However, as I said in my other post, I have no idea whether she personally will actually
do anything further for us. I tend to think not any direct involvement since she's a retrovirologist and has concluded (rightly or wrongly) that no retrovirus is involved, but perhaps she might write an occasional note or say something in public to support the truth that ME/CFS is a true disease and needs to be defined particularly.