Please let us know if you have any more success with XMRV and the media, it could be useful to know how.
Well, basically we have young sufferer who is very seriously ill, and she deserves all the credit. She single-handedly set up a website (
http://www.mesufferersmalta.org) and started doing some pr by having some feature-style articles written in lifestyle magazines. She was also instrumental in getting a poster together which I am pleased to say is also the visual used on the ME Association (UK) website as a cover for the "if only" youtube video.
I got involved last summer, just as the Lo/Alter paper was being published and the story was hitting mainstream press, mostly in the U.S. I contacted a journalist friend of mine who is known for covering controversial stories. However he writes for a newspaper that is not very high in circulation. He picked up on the story and wrote a couple of pieces which we then posted all over facebook - it's easy to do that once you have something in print, even if the hardcopy is not high in circulation. At the same time I started calling (and calling, and calling) the editor of the highest circulation daily newspaper. Eventually, he assigned a journalist to the story who is a doctor herself and she started reading up on it. We gave her lots of feedback and the right pointers and finally we got coverage in the mainstream newspaper. This story got a lot of attention and it prompted the bloodbank to issue a statement!!
Needless to say, there has been little else since, although we know that we have a lifestyle article coming out shortly. We work at it but it's easier to get coverage when there's a big story breaking internationally. I am hoping that there will be some major breakthroughs in 2011, which we will then work at getting coverage for. I think it's worth lying low at this point, so that we don't over-work the story.