I noticed about Holmes in the Klimas lecture transcripts:
Section 2: Viruses & CFS/ME; WPI & XMRV
The other half of the medical literature was looking at pathophysiology, just what's wrong. And this group in Miami has from the very first day, actually the very first group, to look at the immune system as a major mediator of the cause of this illness. In 1989 we wrote a paper from our first series of patients that show that the chronic fatigue patients had immune activation and poor antiviral cell function. We wrote that paper in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology back at the beginning, very early on, and a couple papers right after by Jay Leevy's group that say the same thing, and thats what launched us in this field.
So we've been focused on viruses from the very first day. So what do we know. The very first day we looked at Epstein-Barr virus and other herpes family viruses. Epstein-Barr and Cytomegalovirus were the first viruses that were looked at. Dr. Levy's paper and my own and others said, what we saw in all these virus serologies we looked at, when we looked at the antibodies, was EBV is there, we can't say it's not. There's all kinds of other serology for other things that didn't pan out. But Epstein-Barr over the years, time after time, there's been at least a subgroup of patients that looked to have a higher level of Epstein-Barr virus than they should have. CMV a little less so.
In the 1990s two things happened. First, Elaine DeFreitas and Mike Holmes from New Zealand both published papers at about the same time, 1991-92, saying that they saw a retrovirus in chronic fatigue syndrome. And Dr. Holmes paper had all these beautiful scanning electron micrographs of little budding viruses coming off of white blood cells that looked for all the world like a retrovirus. And Elaine DeFreitas who was at the Wistar Institute at the time published a paper that said she had fairly good evidence that there was a retrovirus.
What happened next was a little complicated, partly from our point of view--we recruited Elaine down at the University of Miami and she joined our faculty, but unfortunately she became very ill very shortly after and left. So we never got to pursue her work which is a shame. Im sure shes feeling very good right now about this new work. The other thing that happened was that the Centers for Disease Control published a paper and presented at a number of conferences that they failed to find that retrovirus. And it was a shame because that was out it was left. There was this positive finding from two different groups, one group saying absolutely not, and then nothing much went further from there. So we lost unfortunately that time from then to now. Ill have to say though, we didnt know this virus hadnt been identified yet. I dont think it would have been a rapid thing there, but certainly we would have been further along than we were now.
