The recent news about Andrew Wakefield prompted me to have a look at some of the studies that found no connections between MMR, autism, and a history of gastrointestinal problems. From the news articles and from wikipedia I was led to 3 references to studies that failed to confirm Wakefield's findings. I only read the abstracts, but it only took a few seconds to see why none of the 3 disprove the general possibility of a connection between vaccines and autism. I could cautiously say that the 3 studies just about rule out the idea that autism is caused by MMR alone, which may have appeared to be Wakefield's original thesis...but these 3 studies, at least, leave the door wide open for the sort of theories that we're interested in here.
Of course we know that if the XMRV infection is a prerequisite for the effect, then the effect would be at least 1/25th the size of a 'direct correlation', and a reasonable estimate would be that less than 1% of people would be susceptible to post-vaccine XMRV-mediated disease. This is well within the tolerance of the tests I saw; indeed one of the primary ones stated a 95% confidence that the autism/MMR correlation is between 0.5 and 2.1, due to a sample size of about 100 and 400 controls, which leaves plenty of room for an effect. Similar was true with the other studies, also notable that one study excluded anyone with atypical autism-spectrum symptoms, which would be exactly the group we are looking for if the XMRV-mediated autism is an atypical subset of all autism as the XMRV theories would predict.
The most interesting study, though, was the Japanese one, where a substantial population had MMR withdrawn and replaced with single vaccines. The study described how, far from falling off, the rate of rise of autism rose significantly when MMR was replaced with a new vaccination regime. This was advanced as evidence that Wakefield was not only wrong according to this study, but in fact if anything the opposite was the case and the single vaccines caused less autism than the MMR. This struck me as somewhat bizarre reasoning, and also rather suggestive. Could it possibly be that it is not specific vaccination protocols that cause retrovirus-mediated autism, but specific retroviral infections in particular batches of vaccines? Perhaps Wakefield might have found the correlation he observed with other vaccines as well - in proportion to the rate of infection of the vaccine with as-yet unknown retroviruses perhaps? The 3 studies I've seen today are a million miles away from disproving such a connection, and all seemingly narrowly focused on one very specific and tight hypothesis - whereas this pet vaccine study seems to confirm that retroviruses do sometimes slip through into commercial vaccines...hmm...
...so any local CFS-related retrovirus, according to this theory, would differ depending on what vaccinations the local population had received and what retroviruses they were therefore infected with...
...hmm...so if one knew this had happened, and knew what the retrovirus was and sequenced it, one would be able to confidently predict which nucleotide sequence from the XMRV genome would NOT be found in the local population - if one had access to official secrets, of course - which would help one to not find it in one's citizens during PCR testing...
Just a thought...