Hey Ladies and Germs,
Regarding the men vs. women with M.E. and or CFS. 95% of the sick gulf war veterans are men. and Garth Nicolson
backed up my claims from CNN that GWS is VERY similar to 'CFS'. Long before any knowledge of a possible XMRV or other single virus.
even a high ranking mole at one of the closed door meetings at Congress in 1996
with willy wonka Reeves testifying for the CDC, called me at home and said "you won't believe what happened today", that a Congressman asked Reeves if there were any similarities
between CFS and GWS and that Reeves paused.....and looked around behind him at the people observing his testimony....and the mole told me that the look on Reeves face was if he was looking for who might 'rat' him out to the public...and Reeves then said, "there was a Mr. Hennessy and his group that has been right early and often...GWS is not just similar to CFS....it is virtually identical..." I only claimed
that they had many similarities. i never said identical. But Garth did a survey of some 35 or more symptoms, and that the 650 gulf war veterans that he tested had come within 5% of the same answers as typical CFS patients.
I didn't then, nor do i now, trust government officials on virtually anything due to our track record with government bureaucrats and the truth...but, two weeks later, i saw Reeves on the CBS evening news, and he was cornered somewhere in DC. and the reporter asked him directly about links between CFS and GWS and he repeated most of what the mole told me. i have him on videotape saying "GWS is not just similar to CFS, it is virtually identical!"
and roughly two years after that, i received word from a military official that worked with the CDC on issues involving new recruits, and this military officer told me that Reeves was doing studies on the saliva and perspiration of recruits being left in the field for 72 hours with NO outside help, and that they were looking for blood, saliva, or perspiration and BP markers for FUTURE soldiers to see if they could identify FUTURE GWS patients before they actually went into battle... (by this time, close to 25% of GWI soldiers had made some kind of complaint or request for partial or complete disability along the lines of symptoms checklists that Garth Nicolson devised.
Eventually, i heard that there was close to 300 million dollars put aside for treatment and investigation of the cause of "Gulf war illnesses"
(they were no longer calling it Gulf war syndrome)
and Reeves official line,...i will never forget this....he said, and the Pentagon repeated it early and often
"There is NO, ONE, NEW and UNIQUE Illness known as Gulf War Syndrome"
Most of us NEVER claimed that it was NEW, OR ONE illness, or that it was UNIQUE!
so the mother F*(*^#$S could truthfully say what they said,
and guess what the PRESS wrote the next day in all the papers..
"Gulf War Syndrome doesn't exist!" which was little Simon the Weasally's take for the past 19 years...
Deliberate misinformation..the old KGB couldn't have been more proud if PRAVDA wrote something similar on the front page!
I lived through the Vietnam War in Japan. the distrust of the average wounded soldier and their doctors in Vietnam, the Phillipines,
and Japan was SOOO damn high. that many soldiers who had the front of their foot blown off by a cheap $3 home made north vietnamese land mine, had doctors make special plaster casts on the front of their foot, with heroin inside, with instructions on
where the soldier could drop off their "package" back in certain cities stateside for 40k to 50k so that they could get a start on getting a house or bankroll, because they knew how long it would take to get any help through the VA. and then with Agent Orange, it took
literally 24 years for them to get anything..and then they got about $4400 a piece! less than 6 months salary back then for an entry level job.
Now, we have something like 285,000 sick soldiers from GW1. and many of them who are getting disability are getting it with CFS or FMS
and a few with MCSS diagnoses. it is criminal!
Not to pour any water on the XMRV crowd. i realize how desparate so many people are. But, i have gone through more than 20,000 letters, phone calls, emails, and at least 1100 personal meetings with so called M.E. or CFS and FMS patients, and i have a hard time believing that this nasty, and from what i hear, fast growing, retrovirus could have destroyed soo many lives in sooo many countries,
and have modern science still having such a hard time isolating it. Not, that i have a hard time finding the CDC utterly incompetent
and stunningly dishonest.
I believe in Rich Vank's work more than most of the so called work product out of NIH or CDC over the past 2 decades, and this Dr. Singh
looks pretty sharp (in more ways than one!)
But, please don't get so revved up about XMRV. It will be worth it for nothing else than it scared the pants off all the middle aged men at CDC and NIH to get off their behinds and do some serious work.
But, if XMRV is found out to be mostly a passenger, or not as ubiquitous as WPI studies originally thought, then all is not lost.
I remember 20 years ago, the pictures of Dr. Bell, Dr. Cheney and Dr. Defreitas on the cover of the CAA chronicle, they acted as if Columbus had just discovered a new continent...and when other mucky mucks couldn't duplicate her work....we were labeled as the biggest hypochondriacs since the first MS. patients. One MS patient mailed me a photo of a special MS wheelchair that had TWO leather straps across the front...one across the waist...and one across the chest...so that the Devil would half to work harder to get the hysterical woman with MS to slither out of her wheelchair...
Remember they locked up Galileo,
and Pasteur was a nutcase for saying "the antigen is nothing, the terrain is everything".
and Samelweiss was proven correct.
and lastly,
"All truth goes through at least three steps"
First, it is ridiculed,
Second, it is vehemently denied
Third, it is accepted as being self evident..."
ciao for now.