Doctors may or may not be geniuses but I would venture to suspect that most doctors who can get through college, medical school and then through their lengthy internships are inherently pretty smart people - whether they have good ideas are bad ideas about CFS. They reflect the general knowledge in the field. CFS is a controversial disease in the medical world and doctors actions simply reflect this. We all know that doctors simply don't have the time to work their way through the niceties of many diseases.
I don't think that any professionals in any intellectually challenging field - and this is certainly one of them - are idiots. When they engage in actions that we don't like or have opinions we don't like it's always comforting to label them as 'idiots' - but they're surely not idiots or even close to it. They may be ignorant of the facts - or stubborn in their opinions - but they are not idiots.
Plus the sending in drops of blood for what is a new and therefore difficult to find pathogen was never going to be a good move. -Garcia
As I noted earlier there was no indication that I could see in the Science paper that XMRV is any more difficult to find than any other virus - that came later. If you look at CD's list you can see that they make their living creating tests to diagnose some very deadly viruses. I assume they know what they're doing.
XMRV was young but not new. XMRV was a known virus and all these labs had samples of it. They were all able to drop XMRV in varying strengths into blood samples and then test for them. Once the WPI said they had found 'XMRV' in the blood of CFS patients CD should've been able to devise a test for XMRV using
their own samples, just as they had done for hepatitis C, HIV, etc. That is what all these labs have been doing. WPI's results suggested that their XMRV was
very close to the standard XMRV. This didn't look like a difficult problem at all in the beginning. They already knew what XMRV looked like; it had already been sequenced. This wasn't discovering a new virus - it was finding and already more or less quantified virus. After all that's how WPI found it. They matched its genetic sequences to the genetic sequences of an already known virus! This wasn't rocket science!
Its unfortunate that some statements have been made suggesting that, as Dr. Raccaniello put it "the rest of the world doesn't know how to do PCR". Those kinds of things having inflamed patients - including me - and obviously riled up the research community (check out the Pharmaceutical articles as well). I've basically decided that Dr. Raccaniello is correct; these people
do know how to do PCR - something else is going on here.
Why they and others have had so much trouble finding it is still unclear. With this new big federal study on its way we should have a solid answer to XMRV fairly soon it sounds like.
Suggesting that they or doctors or any particular researcher is an idiot does injustice to the complexity of XMRV and CFS. As one expert noted "everybody's doing everything right and they're still getting different results"