Bob
Senior Member
- Messages
- 16,455
- Location
- England (south coast)
And continuing the earlier discussion, I keep forgetting about insightful Gkikas Magiorkinis' letter to the Lancet, which demonstrates that we can't possibly be aware of all unexpected possibilities. This is another possibility that the Paprotka paper failed to consider, which again demonstrates that their 'conclusion' cannot possibly be conclusive:
Once a virus is endogenised, it is forced to follow the evolutionary rate of the host. Since XMRV is integrated in cell-lines the virus evolution is restricted to the host's pace of evolution, and viral descendants have none or minimum sequence diversity. Thus, if a contaminated product, previously cultured in cell-lines, is administered to people then the infections would provide the evolutionary patterns reported by Hue and colleagues.4 If the immunological data reported by Lombardi and colleagues5 are correct, then we need to trace the common source for these infections to prevent possible public health concerns. Products from cell-lines should be the first candidates.
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(11)70081-0/fulltext