Aside from the questionable value of peer review (many of us here have completely lost any faith we may have had in that process over the course of the last 2 years, and have lost respect too for the meaningfulness of whether something has been peer-reviewed or not, and that alone highlights the urgent need for reform of the process, which I believe should be very much along the lines that Esther12 has suggested), this does indeed seem to be another positive XMRV study, as Jemal has pointed out.
Since the thread is at risk of being sidetracked onto these questions about how significant peer review is (and it's a relevant question because many of us might well be sceptical that it will be possible for this study to be published precisely because it
is positive), could we perhaps hear more about the implications of this study assuming that it
is valid?
It seems to me that this indicates that Silverman et al are continuing undaunted with XMRV research - which is good news - and that they are continuing to detect XMRV by nested RT-PCR in prostate cancer patients - focusing now on detection in the urine and highlighting the low copy numbers and the "challenges of performing PCR methods as an indicator of XMRV infections". This last sentence, in particular, seems to indicate that Silverman and his group remain entirely unconvinced by the contamination theory, and undaunted by the negative studies.
Quick scan of the paper:
36/143 prostate cancer samples positive (25.2%), 2/63 control samples positive (3.2%) (see p.41 of the paper)
http://etd.ohiolink.edu/send-pdf.cgi/Barton Maria.pdf?kent1309619878, and >99% sequence identity to VP62 ("one nucleotide change in more than 200 nts")...which doesn't appear to worry the team in terms of sequence conservation.
These numbers are once again very much consistent with the previous positive studies, including the rate of infection found in controls.
I guess this may mean that this study can't be published or reported in the press, although (unlike CFS) it does appear that research into the association of XMRV with prostate cancer is still being permitted at present. But to reiterate a point that many of us have made ad nauseam on this forum: if the prostate cancer studies are valid (and the consistent differential rates found by those who
do find it strongly suggest that they are), then the background rate of infection that those studies find in healthy controls is inconsistent with the negative XMRV/CFS studies that failed to find any XMRV in anyone. Statistically it is virtually impossible for valid XMRV assays to fail to detect any XMRV at all in a control group, if XMRV really is present in healthy controls at the levels that this study and others have indicated. We've crunched those numbers often enough and the probability of failing to detect any at all with a valid assay is vanishingly low.
So: these results are consistent with previous positive findings of XMRV in prostate cancer, supportive of the positive XMRV/CFS studies, and inconsistent with the negative XMRV/CFS studies.
It's a positive XMRV study whichever way you slice it, and if the peer review process is going to kick it into the long grass then I think it should be quite obvious why that peer review process needs to be open and transparent if scientists expect informed observers with an interest in ME/CFS to have any trust at all in the trustworthiness of the process.
And given that we also hear that retroviruses such as XMRV are now known to have been created in labs since the 1970s and transmitted horizontally between cell lines surprisingly easily, and thus that these retroviruses are artificial creations, routinely created in labs, which appear to be associated with prostate cancer, ME/CFS and other illnesses, the sheer scale of the controversial implications of what is already known makes it pretty clear that XMRV in ME/CFS is a reality that science simply does not want to face, and certainly does not want to discuss in public at this point in time. And meanwhile...it's back to the CBT and GET for all...and anyone who complains too loudly is just rude...
