Excellent Radio Interview with Professor Warren Tate (NZ)

[OverTheHills]

Professor Warren Tate was interviewed on National Radio' s Saturday morning show - and has said all the right things about ME and XMRV* ! Here is link for the whole thing which is about 15 minutes, and the ME/XMRV bit is from 11:58 - 14:45.


http://static.radionz.net.nz/assets...-Rutherford_Medal_winner_Warren_Tate-m048.asx

Apparently his daughter contracted ME about 20 years ago as a young teenager after glandular fever and it sounds like she was fairly severe at her worst (3 hours rest to get over having a seated shower - sound familiar?). He describes it as devastating a couple of times, says its a disturbance of the innate immune system, mentions 17 million sufferers worldwide, compares it in seriousness to AIDS and mentions XMRV RETROVIRUS as a possible cause (or maybe an exploiter of an already compromised immune system).

He was being interviewed because he has just been awarded the Rutherford medal, NZ's top science prize for molecular biology discoveries which could help AIDS and Alzheimers.

This show is serious & influential & high profile. Late now, will email in tomorrow and thank presenter profusely for excellent interview & of course Prof Tate.

Hurrah!
OTH

* It was described as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or even Chronic Fatigue all the way through. You can't have everything.

 

[Sasha]

Wow! He sounds amazing.

I think it's telling that many of the doctors and researchers who are so dedicated on working for us came into this because a family member has ME. I think that once you know someone with it - someone who you knew well before they got sick - it's very hard to see it as "all in the mind". Given how many of us are sick worldwide, there must be a lot of doctors who have a family member with it (or who develop it themselves in adulthood).

A pity there's not a support group especially for those doctors! They would be a great campaigning group.

 

[pictureofhealth]

Thanks for posting OTH. Its very helpful that he is high profile.

I can't help but wonder how quickly the situation might change for ME patients on the ground if the doctors representing them organised their own professional grassroots campaign to petition Governments and research bodies nationally and internationally for biomedical research.

 

[ukxmrv]

I'm very grateful to Dr Tate and I'm sorry to hear about his daughter.

It's terrible that he has spent the last 20 years working on HIV when he could have been working on CFS. Dr Tate did announce that he was involved in a possible XMRV research projects so I do hope that the tide is turning.

Would have been nice to hear about the 20+ year drought of ME research in NZ. How Dr Holmes and Prof Murdoch couldn't get funding. A real disgrace.

I imagine that Prof. Tate didn't want to go on a soapbox and also to jepordise his future research plans.

 

[Cort]

Great audio of Prof. Tate - glad NZ has someone so attuned to ME/CFS in upper circles - it sounds like.

 

[Gemini]

OTH,

Great interview! Thanks for posting it.

Prof Tate's daughter's experience with ME/CFS and his interest in XMRV make him an excellent spokesperson!

 

[anne_likes_red]

Thanks OTH. Good stuff.
There's a 3 page interview with Tate in the Listener out today - literally just landed on my doorstep. It may appear online later?
Have sent Prof Tate congrats on the award (very. very well deserved IMO). And have thanked Kim Hill for the interview.

Are you going to see Nancy K next week in Wn?? I would dearly love to but have a school meeting that I really have to be at.
I've emailed my GP and his colleagues and invited them to attend though. Trying to think of other people I should encourage to attend. If I added up all the specialists I've seen in the last 26 years it'll be standing room only
Hope you get to go if you want to!
Best,
Anne.

ETA Have contacted an editor on a current affairs programme to see if they will request an interview with Nancy K with regards to ME/CFS & XMRV. Realise she might not want to do anything like that but the editor is a neighbour, and a nice guy (and until now I've held off suggesting "story ideas")...

 

[anne_likes_red]

I transcribed the CFS part...

They spent most of the interview talking his work into understanding HIV biology, RNA, Alzheimers (some interesting stuff!) and neurodegenerative diseases. Then...

KH "You're also looking at Chronic fatigue Syndrome and the molecular biology underlying that. Is that protein work as well?"

WT "Well, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, this comes about because I have a daughter with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She unfortunately developed it at as a very young teenager and has been....you know it is a devastating disease.."

KH "How many years ago?"

WT "Ah that's over twenty years ago..."

KH "Oh my goodness.."

WT ..."and she still lives with the disease day by day, but she has a productive life now, in Auckland, and I'm incredibly proud of her as a daughter - she's just shown enormous resilience. But it also gives me tremendous respect for these people, and there is a real need for work on the disease."

KH "What is it? What is Chronic fatigue Syndrome in your view?"

WT "Ah well it's certainly a disturbance of what's called the innate immune system. So the immune system gets kind of messed up, almost permanently switched on and that can be evidence of a chronic virus.."

KH "So it's like having an auto-immune disease?"

WT "Yes it's quite similar to that, and you know at the height of my daughters illness all she could do each day - she could more or less crawl to the shower and sit on a chair in the shower and have a shower and then it would take about three hours to recover fom that, just that thing. Young people tend to be affected quite badly. Behind the sort of closed doors it's a pretty devastating disease and it's thought that there's probably seventeen million people around the world that are affected so it's not much unlike HIV in many ways..."

KH "Do you think that it has one cause, or do you think that a multitude of things can cause it?"

WT "This is a very astute question Kim, because the thought has been that there are probably multiple initiating events and that might still be the case but there's this new class of retroviruses just been discovered and the key question now is, is that the cause of the disease -it's called XMRV - or does it get into the immune cells of people who are immuno-compromised, or immuno-affected, with Chronic Fatigue, and this has been a very controversial year about this new discovery but that will obviously come out in the future. In my own daughter's case, she got glandular fever, that's an Epstein Barr virus, and the Chronic Fatigue came on subsequent to that. But the Epstein Barr Virus may have created the environment for some other agent to come in and live in her cells."

..Interview winds up.

It's good to have some research led by someone who truly gets how terrible (and how physical) this disease is. There was nothing really new re CFS & XMRV.
I would like to know how he feels his daughter has been able to improve to the extent that she's living a productive life, after having been so badly affected previously. But obviously he would not be supposed to dispense advice!

 

[Francelle]

A great interview with Professor Tate! A man with a rich history of retroviral research, vis HIV, as well as personal experience of M.E./CFS, is a very good man to speak with some authority on this topic of potential XMRV infection.

 

[Sasha]

WT "This is a very astute question Kim, because the thought has been that there are probably multiple initiating events and that might still be the case but there's this new class of retroviruses just been discovered and the key question now is, is that the cause of the disease -it's called XMRV - or does it get into the immune cells of people who are immuno-compromised, or immuno-affected, with Chronic Fatigue, and this has been a very controversial year about this new discovery but that will obviously come out in the future. In my own daughter's case, she got glandular fever, that's an Epstein Barr virus, and the Chronic Fatigue came on subsequent to that. But the Epstein Barr Virus may have created the environment for some other agent to come in and live in her cells."

Interesting that he sees EBV as allowing XMRV in rather than the other way round. I had thought that if you were exposed to HIV you contracted it, regardless of your health status, and that other opportunistic infections then got to run riot in your compromised immune system. Why would Prof Tate think that XMRV would be the secondary infection, not the primary one?

 

[anne_likes_red]

Maybe he means he thinks XMRV becomes "active" after the EBV infection?

He says in the Listener interview that he's about to start work on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and XMRV and this will involve applying some of what he's already learned about HIV - AIDS.
(When I spoke with him at the start of the year he forecast November for a start on this, so at least he's running on time. Lets hope he has a nice fat budget!)

Interesting that he sees EBV as allowing XMRV in rather than the other way round. I had thought that if you were exposed to HIV you contracted it, regardless of your health status, and that other opportunistic infections then got to run riot in your compromised immune system. Why would Prof Tate think that XMRV would be the secondary infection, not the primary one?

 

[ukxmrv]

Somewhere it said that there was NZ$100k attached to the prize. Not sure if that is a reference to money for research or not?

 

[anne_likes_red]

Somewhere it said that there was NZ$100k attached to the prize. Not sure if that is a reference to money for research or not?

I'm not sure either - If it is for research then it may be a timely bonus....
To quote this week's Listener article by Rebecca Priestly:

"Next for Tate is a new venture tackling Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (also known as ME). He and his lab are adapting his anti-HIV work to target the recently discovered retrovirus XMRV, which is believed to be associated with the debilitating ME, which affects up to 1% of the New Zealand population but has no simple diagnostic test and has never been well understood."

As far as I'm aware (correct me any ANZMES people if you know otherwise) his upcoming XMRV work has had approval for funding by the NZ Government.

However it continues with .. "Academic life now is quite intense. I tend to work up to 70 hours a week - I've done that for a long time," says Tate.

So, if the extra money's not meant for research maybe some of it should be spent on a brief restorative holiday.

 

[eric_s]

Interesting that he sees EBV as allowing XMRV in rather than the other way round. I had thought that if you were exposed to HIV you contracted it, regardless of your health status, and that other opportunistic infections then got to run riot in your compromised immune system. Why would Prof Tate think that XMRV would be the secondary infection, not the primary one?

I don't think you contract HIV in any case. There's some HIV in many "places" of the body, as far as i know, but still you can only transmit it in a small number of ways. So you only get it if you are exposed to a large enough number of viruses, but i might be all wrong. And i think i once heard that the poor health status of people in Africa make them more likely to contract it.

 

[Snow Leopard]

http://biochem.otago.ac.nz/professor-warren-tate/

 

[Francelle]

Another link to Prof Tate's work. http://sacfs.asn.au/news/2010/11/11_18_top_award_for_top_scientist.htm

 

[Enid]

Stunning work - thanks for posting. Would that these real scientists (who have the humility and capacity to share - not the UK) may take centre stage.