Kitei Breaks Alter Story - doing her due diligence Mindy Kitei at CFS Central not only got a hold of the paper before publication but also interview Dr. Alter, Dr. Komaroff and others.
The surprise of the paper was what Dr. Alter didn't find - XMRV! Even more surprising was the fact that his finding of a melange of closely related viruses actually made sense in some ways. One reason that none of the six or so CFS studies have been able to find 'XMRV' may be that the type of XMRV they looked for was different. This doesn't explain, though, how the WPI found 'the same type' of XMRV in 67% of its original cohort since that cohort was made up of patients across the US.
Kitei, however, reported that Dr. Alter believes his findings confirm the original XMRV findings stating "Viruses tend not to be homogenous,” Alter explained to CFS Central in a telephone interview. “The fact that we didn’t find XMRV doesn’t bother me because we already knew that retroviruses tend to be variable. They mutate a lot, basically. This is true of HIV and HCV [hepatitis C virus]. It’s not one virus. It’s a family of viruses.” Dr. Alter should certainly know - his work on hepatitis viruses that lead to the discovery of two new viruses garnered him the 'Nobel Prize' of Medicine - the Lasker Award. Dr. Alter found
no less than four different types of heretofore undiscovered mLV's in CFS. They were named, appropriately, "CFS Type I", "CFS Type II", etc.
Mutating over time like any good virus should - Dr. Alter was also able to find the pathogens in blood that was fifteen years old and then retest those individuals today. He found the virus present in 7/8 of them in mutated form - which is exactly what one would expect from a virus over tiem.
According to Kitei, Dr. Alter felt the delay in releasing the study only strengthened the study, stating “There were no changes in the conclusions, but we added data that made the conclusions stronger,” he explained. “For one thing, we did some further work to feel confidant that there was no contamination…. We had hundreds of negative controls, and every assay had negative controls. And then we used an assay from mouse mitochondrial DNA and found that there was no evidence of mouse contamination. We had variation in the viruses we were finding. If there was a contaminant, you’d find one species, not several.”
Now Dr. Alter will give XMRV its next big test - he will search for it in a wide variety of disorders. The danger is that it is widespread in chronic diseases, which, would negate its importance unless it really is some sort of superbug. Hopefully, it will be found clustered in a series of 'NEID's' such as FM, GWS, MCS, IBS. Now we await the results of the briefing.
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