I'd like to challenge the idea that the reason scientists are so much more interested in XMRV in relation to prostate cancer than to CFS is because prostate cancer is "a guy thing", which a couple of posters have suggested in this thread.
Sure, CFS apparently affects more women than men, and I have no doubt that sexism has been a factor in the dismissive attitude to CFS. But actually, if you look like-for-like and compare the attention given to breast cancer with the attention given to prostate cancer, you would draw some quite different conclusions about the gender politics.
I don't have any statistics to hand, but last I heard, prostate cancer had just overtaken breast cancer as a cause of death in the UK, and the incidence and death rates for prostate and breast cancer had always been comparable. Yet breast cancer has received vastly more attention than prostate cancer. In the UK, breast cancer screening has been steadily ramped up with big campaigns about it, there is a lot of media attention, and high-profile charities for breast cancer. Prostate cancer, on the other hand, is not screened for, and has received very little attention. Only in the last few years have the alarm bells started to ring, mainly because the prostate numbers are now looking more blatantly significant after so much progress has been made with breast cancer.
Ask yourself this: how much more do you hear about breast cancer than you do about prostate cancer? The difference is massive, considering that the two conditions have similar incidence and death rates (and I do hope somebody's not going to pop up with stats to debunk that assertion! It's just what I've read...)
So actually, prostate cancer has been greatly under-emphasised, perhaps mainly because of the taboos and embarassment that surround it, and if you analyse the issue more deeply I suspect you would conclude that any gender dynamics going on here are not to the benefit of men.
Instead, the reason why researchers are more interested in prostate cancer than in CFS has more to do with the massive over-emphasis on cancer research in recent decades, to the detriment of almost all other medical research. In the UK, the top fundraising charities are all cancer charities, and the cancer charities dwarf all other charitable income. This money massively distorts medical research.
So: I don't think it's "a guy thing" - I think it's "a cancer thing". Cancer is where the money is at.
Worse, there is a big 'conspiracy theory' argument about cancer research that somewhat parallels our experience of the organised distortion of CFS research. The Simon Wessely of that world (in the UK) was the massively influential Sir Richard Doll, who towards the end of his career drove a policy (in both US and UK) of NOT researching environmental causes of cancer (despite having identified links with smoking, radiation and drinking earlier in his career), nor looking for cures. Instead, research has been almost exclusively focused on treatments, which are of course much more lucrative.
I have long believed that this policy is hugely misguided, to an extent that - as with CFS - leads one to naturally think 'conspiracy' because it's just so unfathomably dumb. History tells us that the big scientific breakthroughs come in unexpected areas, almost apparently by chance, and often quite unrelated to the subject actually being studied. The rational policy is to support academic freedom, to leave room for boffins to decide for themselves where to focus their research, and to cast the net as widely as possible in the search for knowledge.
So the above politics of cancer research (which those of you with an interest in "MCS" are probably aware of) also feeds into the XMRV story in an incredible emerging parable of the errors of recent decades. Just imagine: research into XMRV and CFS may well end up unlocking the secrets of the immune system, the relationship between the immune and neurological systems, and maybe even some big clues to the causes and etiology of cancer. If XMRV can cause prostate cancer, and if we can trace exactly how it does that, maybe that will lead to a much deeper understanding of what cancer really is...who knows where this may lead?!
I think the emerging lesson here is that when you ignore a set of apparently trivial issues, you are ignoring the clues that could help you solve the really big problems you're struggling with. It's similar to the 'broken windows' theory. In my experience of resolving tough problems with complex networked computer systems, that is one of my golden rules: look for the little, weird, apparently trivial clues that lead you to the heart of the problem.
And if it turns out that while they've all been busy ignoring us for a few decades, we've been busy infecting them with a retrovirus that can cause cancer...well, that would be a parable, and it would be hard for me to resist saying "serves them right!".
Apologies for rambling again...guess this had better be my last post of the night!