I have heard through a very reliable source in the US that the CDC is attempting to report results of a negative study, but that they used a patient cohort from Reeves and bad PCR methods. When will the US government put a stop to the CDC?
Wow, you'd think after all that has been said from the beginning about people not culturing this virus before doing PCR, and the CDC moving Reeves aside they would have at least A) used the exact same methodology as the WPI in their study and B) recruited new patients (or at least re-evaluated) the patients that Reeves had picked out to make sure they met the same criteria as the Science paper.
I hope this isn't true, or if it is, I hope they get scrutinized to the point where they re-do their work to make it a valid replication.... using all 4 methods outlined in Science, and the new antibody test as well.
But seriously though, this is getting ridiculous already.... CAN SOMEONE JUST DO A FRICKIN' STUDY THAT ACTUALLY REPLICATES THE METHODOLOGY ORIGINALLY USED TO FIND THIS VIRUS IN CFS? IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK? What is the point of publishing a paper on this if you aren't going to try to replicate the methodology? Isn't that the whole point of "replication"?
Barring that, can someone take a cue from the Emory study and look for it in the GI track, lungs, or lymph nodes of CFS patients? Its not like CFS patients don't have swollen nodes, and GI symptoms... it would be pretty easy to justify doing such a study.
If contamination with such viruses is so common that all three of the Science paper labs were contaminated simultaneously (WPI, NCI, CC - despite not sharing samples), then it stands a very good chance that at least one of the replicating labs would be also contaminated. But supposedly this isn't the case? Hmmmm right....
Maybe if one of the labs that produced the negative studies is soooo sure they aren't contaminated they can bring Mikovitz or Ruscetti to their lab and have them replicate their original methodology in their "non-contaminated" lab on fresh blood.
And then what about Dr. Hubers study? Reportedly she got not one positive using her PCR, but then she re-ran it using the WPI 4 step test and got many positives? How does that get explained?
Also, IIRC there have been a decent number of papers that haven't found this virus in prostate cancer either, but nobody is questioning the validity of that finding... in fact the line seems to be "well we know its associated with prostate cancer, this much is true, but CFS... ehhhh".
Sorry for the rant, but this is seriously annoying.