Hi xrayspex
A culture test involves taking your blood and 'growing' the virus from your blood which is time consuming and costly. It does however mean that it's there in a dish for all to see, no denial that one 'has' the virus and it's infectious. An antibody test shows your body has detected the virus and launched an immune response against it, this is cheaper far quicker to get the results back on and shows that your body isn't ignoring a 'harmless' virus.
What would be really interesting to know, is are the sickest people with ME/CFS with active infectious XMRV (shown by + culture), possibly lacking XMRV antibodies (new serology test) and cannot launch an immune response to it. Zero published data on that.
One can only know if one has XMRV currently by doing
both tests. (If someone 'just' had an antibody test which was negative, theoretically one would therefore not be aware of still maybe having XMRV unless having a PCR/culture test done
in addition to the antibody test).
Even then we are presumably not 100% sure we don't have XMRV as other tests may come out in the near future that detect XMRV outside of the blood, such as in the spinal fluid or respiratory tract/saliva and maybe other tissues in the future. E.g. Heart biopsy? A recent patent on XMRV testing includes CSF (spinal fluid)....which is rather interesting as that would show XMRV in the central nervous system = neuro disease.
ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) is a neuro disease and lots of biomedical research shows neuro abnormalities in ME and CFS, especially very high lactate. This group of people then are shown to be positive in an FDA test for XMRV in very high numbers.......hmm..... I wonder what that could mean......
