Miyazawa XMRV is almost undistinguishable from an ERV present in mice

[leelaplay]

Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks posted this to co-cure Feb 14 2010

In a preprint by Miyazawa et al. to be published in the Journal of Virology,
http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/JVI.02715-09v1
http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/reprint/JVI.02715-09v1.pdf

The following is on pg 8 of the study:
A recently identified novel human retrovirus (xenotropic murine leukemia virus related retrovirus, XMRV) has been found in some forms of prostate cancers and chronic fatigue syndrome in man (13, 20, 22) although causal association has not been proven yet.

XMRV is almost undistinguishable from an ERV present in mice and it will be important to investigate how this virus passed into
the human population, regardless of its pathogenic potential.

Interestingly, the current methods used for screening human vaccines for retroviral contaminants include extremely sensitive
PCR-based RT assays (not required for veterinary vaccines) that are much more sensitive than conventional RT assays. Thus,
contamination of human vaccines with XMRV, would not pass undetected with the currently available technology although
this may not be necessarily true for vaccines produced in previous decades.
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(c) 2010 American Society for Microbiology

Full study is:

J. Virol. doi:10.1128/JVI.02715-09
Copyright (c) 2010, American Society for Microbiology and/or the Listed Authors/Institutions. All Rights Reserved.

Isolation of an Infectious Endogenous Retrovirus in a Proportion of Live Attenuated Vaccines for Pets