I remember that at the IiME conference Dr Bieger gave a presentation, and that he reported they had success in finding XMRV and that it was present in blood very low copy numbers.
His assays were calibrated to the VP62 variant, could not initially find it, but later succeeded after advice from Dr Mikovits on his methods.
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I have lent my DVD to a friend and cant refer to it now - blast - so I am relying on my memory.
It is a shame that the current situation makes it so difficult for positive studies to publish because one needs to know more...
So I do not know whether the research he is referring to in the video from January 2012 only did PCR for VP62, or whether they did try to look for further variants subsequent to the May 2011 IiME conference, when I heard him speak.
In other words, is the 5% positive, only for a sequence that can be found with VP62 assays?
Currer, your mention that you don't currently have access to your copy of the DVD prompted me to watch the presentation and take some notes. Since Dr Bieger seems to have now broken his silence in this Youtube clip, I hope it is now acceptable to post some quotes from that presentation. If the following information is not acceptable to post publicly (in which case it presumably never will be!), I'll take it down if asked, although I must say once again that this whole situation where only those 'in the know' are allowed access to certain bits of highly pertinent scientific information provides fertile ground for misunderstandings, conspiracy theories and an atmosphere of distrust - and this situation is of course due to the inadequacy of modern scientific publication practices, and not the fault of Dr Bieger or IiME.
I'll keep the quotes very brief, on points relevant to the issues we are wondering about on this thread.
"Right now we have about 100 patients under work, they are still under work and I can't tell you how many of them are positive; approximately 40% but I still think there's a lot of work to be done to improve the techniques and also to extend it to related virus species which we didn't do so far".
(So this roughly 40% positive rate seems to have descended to 5% in the last 7 months).
Slide is headed "XMRV sequences in PBMC DNA from CFS patients" and positive amplicons are labelled "22RV1 DNA" and (separately) "VP62".
Dr Bieger also refers to a western blot test they developed which found XMRV antibody-positive results for several ME/CFS patients.
He also focused on EBV:
"We focus on EBV too because I think among the best papers about treatment of CFS are the two reporting about antivirals used in long-term treatment of patients...actually in Germany, CMV we find not quite often, of course we have HHV6 which we also try to look at but it's not as prevalent as EBV"
Concluding remarks:
"We are certain...and we did a LOT of work in (?) contamination...we have a very good setup at the University of Heidelberg, at the Institute of Neurology, and we are sure that XMRV is present in Germany too...we don't know what that means, but of course it is very challenging...and we also see, at least in the example of EBV, that we have a lot of co-infection, co-activation, and as the literature shows, it might be reasonable, at least in a certain part of patients where we see the co-activation, that we do anti-viral treatment directed against that."
I do hope it's OK now to post this information publicly; if anyone has or knows of any objection to this, please contact me and I will take it down.
