I may be biased because I was studying virology/vaccinology for my masters when my fatigue worsened and I had to drop out.
That's very interesting, it would be good to get your perspective on the
non-cytolytic coxsackievirus B and echovirus infections found in the tissues of ME/CFS patients.
During the acute infection in the host, enterovirus actually undergoes a tiny mutation in its genome, and this genomic change converts regular enterovirus into non-cytolytic enterovirus, which is in effect is a different virus with a different lifecycle. Non-cytolytic enterovirus does not follow the normal lytic cycle of regular enterovirus, but instead lives inside cells as naked viral ssRNA and dsRNA.
These intracellular non-cytolytic enterovirus infections are slow at replicating and exist only at low levels in the tissues, but do have mechanisms whereby they can transmit and infect other cells. And they can persist for decades or indefinitely.
One signature of non-cytolytic enterovirus is the relative amounts of positive strand and negative strand viral ssRNA. In a normal lytic enterovirus infection, you find a ratio of about 100 times more positive strand than negative strand. But in non-cytolytic infection, the ratio is closer to 1:1.
In
Dr Chia's $250 own lab test for detecting non-cytolytic enterovirus in stomach tissue sample, he normally uses the enterovirus VP1 protein stain to detect enterovirus. In his research papers though, he uses both the VP1 stain and PCR testing. The stain seems to have more sensitivity than PCR:
his paper found 82% of ME/CFS patients' stomach tissues positive by the stain, but only 37% by PCR.
British ME/CFS researchers in the 1990s used to use skeletal muscle biopsies of ME/CFS patients to detect enterovirus by PCR. These British biopsy studies are listed in
this MEpedia article. But muscle biopsies are painful and leave a scar, so that's why Dr Chia pioneered a new approach using stomach biopsies instead, which are not painful.
With biopsies, you can also get sampling error, as you may resect a piece of muscle tissue which happens not to contain any virus. So then you can get a false negative. For his stomach biopsies, Dr Chia asks the gastroenterologist to cut a sample of stomach tissue in an inflamed area of the stomach, so that you are more likely to snip a piece of tissue containing the virus.
I don't have any background in biology or medical science, but I got interested in these non-cytolytic enterovirus infections, and over a 10 year period, slowly learnt a few things about them.
I wrote
this MEpedia article on non-cytolytic enterovirus (though it has never been checked by a virologist, so may contain errors).
Non-cytolytic enterovirus is not only found in ME/CFS, but is also found in (and may be the cause of) type 1 diabetes, dilated cardiomyopathy, and several other chronic diseases.