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Is XMRV a major cause of mental health problems across the world?

SilverbladeTE

Senior Member
Messages
3,043
Location
Somewhere near Glasgow, Scotland
from stuff on a thread that has gone to hell, sigh, and form another regarding the possibility of 500 or so million people being infected with XMRV, a thought struck me:

What if XMRV is a major cause of mental illness across the world and this has been overlooked because of it's hard-too-find nature, and the blind zealotry of some of the psychs?

Syphilis and Lyme disease are both neurological and most definatley, organically based not psychological, both cause serious mental health problems.
Evidence supports the belief that many of the world's worst tyrants and killers were suffering from syphilis and their crimes and madness were to some extent, caused by the disease. See Al Capone, the gangster, for example, who died of end stage syphilis.

Note also work suggesting a pathogenic cause for schizophrenia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Possible_link_to_psychiatric_disorders

So, if 500 million people have XMRV, and ME is one facet of how it expresses itself as a disease, and possibily autism, then it could be a HUGE cause of mental health issues.
Note: talking about organically based damage etc here causing mental illness, not bullsh*t "somatoform" lunacy (which has been REPEATEDLY proven wrong in medicla history)
Irritability, memory loss, depression, etc all stem from having ME. There could be other variants of how XMRV affects the brain or other areas causing mental health problems we don't as yet know.

If so, the delicious irony is the "Weasels" could have won Nobel Prizes for uncovering such a huge source of Human misery and thus potential therapies if they had investigated organically based issues rather pyschological, but they were blinded by their own dogma and zealotry ;)
 

ukxmrv

Senior Member
Messages
4,413
Location
London
Silverblade,

I guess it must be because I am on ME forums I'm used to the idea that a retrovirus could cause mental illness. I remember when the Science paper (on XMRV) was first published someone mentioned that this would not be enough to get the Psychiatrists off our backs because of the tentative linking to things like Schizophrenia to viri.

Did you notice that when the McClure/Wessely (spit) paper was published one of the co-authors was David Collier?

2 Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry (King's College London) De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London, United Kingdom

http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/staff/profile/default.aspx?go=10610&local=True

Research focuses on the molecular genetic analysis of the major psychoses, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, migraine, and the eating disorders anorexia and bulimia nervosa. Current projects include the SGENE project, a European Commission funded genome wide association study (GWAS) of schizophrenia,