In today's XMRV Buzz, Cort wrote (my bolding):
"'Living with CFS' basically got Dr. McClure to get down to the nitty gritty about XMRV in a series of emails. Dr. McClure believes the WPI's results and presumably Dr Alter's results (and Dr. Hansen's results? and the UK Mikovits study results?) are probably due to contamination and were confounded by the fact that blinding/randomization was not done and that not all the samples were treated 'in the same way and at the same time'. Of course she has her points - she is a published retrovirologist - and we shall see. Dr. Singh is in the middle of her study which is designed to answer all of Dr. McClures concerns and, of course, the DHHS and NIH studies will as well."
At the XMRV workshop, a lot seemed to be being said about XMRV/MLVs being very sensitive to how the blood samples were collected and stored. I had the impression that in at least some studies, CFS samples were from banked collections and control cases were recently collected especially for the study; and vice versa. My memory on this is foggy and my reading superficial so I could be dead wrong, but Dr McClure seems to be saying this.
This is a different argument from that involving contamination; the suggestion presumably is that if you treat blood collection differently in the case & control groups, differences in the apparent rate of XMRV+ is due to differences in how the blood has been treated, not the underlying prevalence of XMRV in the two groups.
The implication would be, of course, that XMRV must be very prevalent in the general population because if contamination isn't an issue (as I gather other research has indicated that it is not) then XMRV would be as prevalent in the control as the CFS groups (where it is showing up in 50%+ of cases in studies that have proved capable of detecting it at all).
My question: am I wrong that the blood in the CFS and control groups has been collected/treated/stored differently in those studies that have found a difference between CFS & control groups?
"'Living with CFS' basically got Dr. McClure to get down to the nitty gritty about XMRV in a series of emails. Dr. McClure believes the WPI's results and presumably Dr Alter's results (and Dr. Hansen's results? and the UK Mikovits study results?) are probably due to contamination and were confounded by the fact that blinding/randomization was not done and that not all the samples were treated 'in the same way and at the same time'. Of course she has her points - she is a published retrovirologist - and we shall see. Dr. Singh is in the middle of her study which is designed to answer all of Dr. McClures concerns and, of course, the DHHS and NIH studies will as well."
At the XMRV workshop, a lot seemed to be being said about XMRV/MLVs being very sensitive to how the blood samples were collected and stored. I had the impression that in at least some studies, CFS samples were from banked collections and control cases were recently collected especially for the study; and vice versa. My memory on this is foggy and my reading superficial so I could be dead wrong, but Dr McClure seems to be saying this.
This is a different argument from that involving contamination; the suggestion presumably is that if you treat blood collection differently in the case & control groups, differences in the apparent rate of XMRV+ is due to differences in how the blood has been treated, not the underlying prevalence of XMRV in the two groups.
The implication would be, of course, that XMRV must be very prevalent in the general population because if contamination isn't an issue (as I gather other research has indicated that it is not) then XMRV would be as prevalent in the control as the CFS groups (where it is showing up in 50%+ of cases in studies that have proved capable of detecting it at all).
My question: am I wrong that the blood in the CFS and control groups has been collected/treated/stored differently in those studies that have found a difference between CFS & control groups?