Here is a list of the ME outbreaks including the Swiss ones and LA County Hospital:
http://www.name-us.org/ResearchPages/ResEpidemic.htm
Hi caledonia,
An interesting thing about the list of epidemics at the above link, is that it stops at 1990. This was right after the (then) new case definition for CFS. It has occurred to me before that this might not be coincidence.
CFS requires that you wait for six months for confirmation of diagnosis. If you wait six months, and there was an epidemic, then the epidemic has stopped. If the epidemic has stopped, then there is no need to report it. Keep in mind that most cases of uncomplicated post viral fatigue resolve on their own, and doctors expect that. This reinforces the desire to wait.
A major concern of mine is that the existence of a CFS diagnostic criteria has halted reporting of outbreaks. I don't know if this was intended or coincidental. What I think is that some powers-that-be might be happy with not having to deal with epidemics that they do not understand, which might reinforce the desire to keep the CFS diagnostic criteria and not dispose of it.
Of course there could be other reasons for non-reporting of epidemics. I note this list is much smaller than a similar list of CFS outbreaks (but I don't have any links to one). It is possible that the epidemics that are reported with CFS that I think go to 1998 were never investigated for ME, only CFS, and so it was never recorded as an ME outbreak even if one occurred.
The comments in another post on Dr Deckoff-Jones and her blog re the possible start of XMRV is not new, but I am glad to see the link in dates between the origins of ME and autism are emphasized. I don't know if we can link the virus to vaccines, maybe, maybe not. However, the existence of contaminated cell cultures, now that we think that these viruses can evade level two biosafety protocols, means that all lab workers, even cleaning staff, are at risk of infection. We don't know how big that risk is. We don't know when it started. The late 1920s maybe?
The debate over XMRV or MLV is irrelevant. Show me a population with MLVs, and enough people and time, and I will show you a population with XMRV. The X virus clearly can arise in any large population of MLV patients, and it may be able to spread faster (this is a guess, but there are some reasons to think so). In addition, it is possible that patients with MLVs are permissive to XMRV. Also, due to our blood restriction factors, MLVs will rarely be detected in blood. Ironically, this arises as a consequence of Miller's recent paper, which showed how effective our blood is at destroying MLVs. Alas, MLVs do not live in the blood. For decades scientists were convinced that humans do not get retroviruses, none could be found. HTLV and HIV were a shock. Could MLVs be another shock waiting to happen?
This is not to say that MLV infections of humans are real. We found the smoking gun, but we are still waiting for the ballistics reports.
Bye
Alex