In a recent Oslers Web blog post, Johnson quoted Mikovits, "
"This the worst public health crisis in our history and the government has no right to stop [this paper's] publication,"
My thoughts on a dark night are that we are being rocketed from marginality and mockery to a place where we might be feared and marginalized again; before we could be ignored or joked about.
They have to get on the stick with determining exactly how the illness is transmitted because until they do, and it is convincing, we are going to be targets. You can't claim cluster cases and then deny the virus isn't transmissable. We all know that it is.
I think about this sometimes, too, and I do worry about being marginalized because people fear contracting the disease. And then I wonder if perhaps people
should worry, maybe they
should avoid us until we really do know exactly how this thing is transmitted. I'm not 100% sure how or when this (presumed) pathogen entered my body, and I'm sure I'm not alone. I would hate to pass this to another person, but at the same time I would also hate it if no one would let their children play with my grandson if he's HGRV positive, or if no one would want to eat with us. Much worse things happened to people in the early days of HIV. It took a while for people to become educated about how HIV is passed, but for the most part, it's nothing today like it used to be for HIV+ people in society today. Maybe people have evolved somewhat and won't fear casual social contact with us assuming that casual social contact turns out to be safe.
But until we know exactly how this is passed, maybe caution really is called for. On the PR poll about family members who have this disease, the incidence of people whose significant others are sick is pretty low while the incidence of people with "CFS" who have other family members with that diagnosis is amazingly high. There are a lot of ways to explain this, but on the face of it, it's really puzzling, and not at all what you would expect from a retrovirus. You don't see a pattern like this with HIV-AIDS, at least not to my knowledge. We just need answers and we need then soon, because we are faced with some extremely important questions. It's comforting to know that lots of research is in progress or soon to begin. It's comforting to know that we don't have to rely on the CDC for the answers, too! I do think that when the transmission questions are answered, it will turn out to be very interesting indeed!