William Switzer - CDC looking for XMRV and MLV in lab workers!

[Navid]

i sent a letter of disgust to her and stoye....two sickening, despicable people.

 

[Dreambirdie]

HERE's MY NOTE TO BERGMAN:

I have been ill with CFS for 33 years. I have lost 3 decades of my life to this hideous, and FYI very debilitating neuro immune disease. And I am not alone. CFS affects btwn 1-4 million Americans, and approx 17 million people worldwide. According to Dr Nancy Klimas, who splits her practice between HIV and CFS, her HIV patients are "hale and hearty" compared to her CFS patients, who are often desperately ill and completely unable to participate in life.

Your comment at the recent conference on XMRV, which reduced the CFS patient community to a bunch of anti HIV believers and conspiratorial nut jobs, was really quite reprehensible. The suffering of very sick people is not a joke. Shame on you for making it into one.

 

[alex3619]

But that's my point. The spinning that this is just a contaminant or that it can't be linked to illness is kind of out the window when someone repeatedly trying to play it down admits to at least testing himself once, and that there are concerns about lab workers. If it causes no illness, then who cares if they've got it?

Hi alphahusky, I think I should start calling my denier hat the devils advocate hat, or DA hat. I used to love wearing it. So, hat on.

This is the precautionary principle. Sure, it probably not infecting workers, and probably does not cause disease, but they have to be careful in protecting workers health. There are legal principles involved.

DA hat off. Yes, but why don't they make sure the blood supply is safe? Similar principle? Of course, they will just argue that is what the BWG is for, and that is a valid point. I just think ban first, investigate, then decide is a lot safer.

Bye
Alex

 

[Grape Funk]

Hi Cort, Hue could be right or very very wrong. It was not a large study, they did not look at diverse XMRV strains I suspect - there is a claim that XMRV and PMLVs have major diversity in patients, but it is not published. All the unpublished papers that are claimed to be sitting at the WPI need to be published somewhere, and if they can't find top journals, they should be publishing in lower ranked journals.

"There is a claim that...".

For some peculiar reason I have an itch this might be one of those - nudge nudge wink wink types you just explained yourself, as i'm reading beyond what is stated here

 

[Dreambirdie]

I think we ALL should write Bergman. That remark was really quite reprehensible.

HERE IS A LINK TO AIDSTRUTH.ORG

http://www.aidstruth.org/contact

I've written to Donnica Moore, Judy Mikovits and Nancy Klimas about Bergman's comment, and asked them to respond to her.

Human suffering is not a joke. She needs to hear from us.

 

[alex3619]

"There is a claim that...".

For some peculiar reason I have an itch this might be one of those - nudge nudge wink wink types you just explained yourself, as i'm reading beyond what is stated here

Hi Grape, hence I call it a claim. The claim needs to be published and scrutinized, hence I am calling for them to publish. When we have so little data, it is hard to figure out what is happening. Bye, Alex

 

[Cort]

Hi Cort, Hue could be right or very very wrong. It was not a large study, they did not look at diverse XMRV strains I suspect - there is a claim that XMRV and PMLVs have major diversity in patients, but it is not published. All the unpublished papers that are claimed to be sitting at the WPI need to be published somewhere, and if they can't find top journals, they should be publishing in lower ranked journals.

If you use a test can only find a narrow range, and the range of the patient samples is small, all you will find is a narrow range. Most of these studies are just indicative, and then follow with "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" arguments that imply possible conclusions, without actually proving them.

The technology exists to develop definitive findings on XRMV, but the funding is not there, like always. If either side had more funding, the quality of data would be very much better, from much better experiments.

Bye
Alex

I know what you're saying but I don't know. They actually looked at alot of strains of XMRV from 22RV1 and prostate cancer but they only looked at two strains from CFS patients those were the WPI strains. Those two strains, though, were almost exactly the same as the 22RV1 strains. Plus the Science stated that all the gag and env sequences from all the patients were 99% similar to the VP62 strain (which basically the same as 22RV1). So there's some indirect evidence that the other strains at the WPI are probably not very different.

I don't know how much it costs to sequence an entire virus, but darn it, this has been an issue for 9 months now. Can't the WPI find the funds the sequence just 5 or 10 more strains? They had the funds to find an immune signature and that finding is meaningless unless they can convince the research world that XMRV is viable and I think they need to demonstrate more variability to do that.

Maybe it, like DNA integration, is more difficult than I think - I dont know.

 

[kurt]

HERE's MY NOTE TO BERGMAN:

...

Your comment at the recent conference on XMRV, which reduced the CFS patient community to a bunch of anti HIV believers and conspiratorial nut jobs, was really quite reprehensible. The suffering of very sick people is not a joke. Shame on you for making it into one.[/I]

I agree, this comment comes across poorly to sick people trying to get better. However, I think Bergman was just trying to make an ironic comment. I did not get the impression from any of the presenters that they were insinuating we were not sick, they are just saying XMRV is not the cause of our illness and treating with ART is premature. But it was a pretty flippant remark, I'm sure she regrets saying that...

 

[alex3619]

Now for some more Devils Advocate hat stuff.

I put forward an alternative XMRV contamination hypothesis on another thread recently. Basically that XMRV was real, but in lab workers and they were contaminating the samples. Since patient samples are handled more, this might mean that patients samples have a risk of real contamination, from a real virus.

This hypothesis has major problems, but fits with the cell line origin theory of XMRV. It also explains why some labs are finding it and not others - those labs have infected lab techs. Labs that don't have infected lab techs can't find the virus.

Bye
Alex

 

[Dreambirdie]

it was a pretty flippant remark, I'm sure she regrets saying that...

I would like to MAKE SURE she regrets it. It was inappropriate and very uncompassionate.

 

[Grape Funk]

Now for some more Devils Advocate hat stuff.

I put forward an alternative XMRV contamination hypothesis on another thread recently. Basically that XMRV was real, but in lab workers and they were contaminating the samples. Since patient samples are handled more, this might mean that patients samples have a risk of real contamination, from a real virus.

This hypothesis has major problems, but fits with the cell line origin theory of XMRV. It also explains why some labs are finding it and not others - those labs have infected lab techs. Labs that don't have infected lab techs can't find the virus.

Bye
Alex

How do you explain such difference in percentage of control vs experimental

 

[alex3619]

Hi grape funk, this question keeps being asked and its a good question.

This is one of the things I have against the hypothesis - controls and patients should be more or less the same, and they are not. I think the hypothesis is probably wrong, but I would like proof. "I think" is not a valid scientific finding.

However, as has been said many times, controls get tested a few times, patient samples get tested many many times, there is more risk of contamination from infected lab staff the more it is handled. This is a nudge nudge wink wink argument though - it has to be proved, and nobody has done that.

bye
Alex

 

[Marco]

"Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus-Related Virus (XMRV) Probably Originated Through Recombination Between Two Endogenous Murine Retroviruses During in vivo Passage of a Human Prostate Cancer Xenograft"

I wouldn't get too hung up on when this is alleged to have taken place.

If recombination happened in this case, why not in other mouse human xenografts?

Does anyone know when mouse human xenografts were first attempted? From a quick google the earliest reference I could find was 1983 (Neuroblastoma) but must have predated this.

Then I found this :

"Already, even before the First World War, interest in the future discipline of immunology had begun. In 1903, Jensen reported that tumour cells injected into mice grew better in some than in others. If such an injected tumour resolved, re-injection of identical tumour cells into the same mouse failed to produce another growth. In 1936, George Davis Snell, working in the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, began to study the behaviour of transplanted tumours. He developed highly inbred strains of mice over a decade of sibling mating. Within each strain, every mouse had the same genetic constitution. He showed that transplanted tumours grew in all mice of the same strain, but were rejected by all other strains."

http://www.bts.org.uk/about-the-bts/history/

 

[jace]

Dr Yes was talking about the BWG stage II blinded samples XMRV results cross-lab.

The first table is by Western Blot, and three out of six labs obtained false positives. The second table is plasma, and no-one had any false positives. All had false negatives.

Note that the CDC, as Yes said, had some of the best test results, finding XMRV in lower concentrations than the NIH or the WPI, and caught no false positives in the negative samples. I'm sure we saw this table at the BWG late fall/autumn last year. Since these tests were carried out, the CDC co-operated with CoOpDx, in the Satterfield study with a different test, which gave an 0/0 result.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21366602 (headline and authors only)

 

[justinreilly]

Seriously Cort, have you ever heard W. Switzer or anyone else at the CDC utter the words "we share your concern" when talking about ME/CFS? They have been forced to spend the money on XMRV! And it has not been government money. It started with researchers taking funds from other projects and look at all of the good CFS research that can't get Federal funds (Alan Light!).

As for my faith in the rest of humanity. I trust that there are many who are sincere with good intentions but given WHAT WE KNOW of our governments history (the Tuskegee and Guatemalan syphilis experiments for starters - most of those responsible went to their graves keeping these secrets), it might be reassuring to have warm fuzzy thoughts that no one could be that callus but it simply does not conform to the facts.

Some people are more concerned about their own interests, no matter how petty, that that of those around them. I can appreciate your wanting to see the world as full of nice fuzzy bunnies and butterflies but those bunnies are often a nice sized appetizer for the wolves and you can bet that the wolf doesn't give the bunny a second thought.

Sorry for raining on the fuzzy bunny parade.

And yes, this is a serious and dark disease at times!

CBS, I agree.

I think it is a very good possibility that the US govt created the pathogen(s) that cause ME (and perhaps Lyme). The war on science and patients is too well orchestrated and has gone on too long for an innocent explanation to be plausible at least at the level of CDC and NIH top brass, and probably past presidents, maybe this one too. If the UK created it on its own i doubt it would have the pull to influence the US govt enough to deny it.

Something along the lines of SV40 in vaccines and Lyme possibly coming from Plum island.

If 'they' get me, you know why since i've started barking up this tree. : )

 

[justinreilly]

When I watched the video, I was astonished. Stoye was saying, "this means that XMRV is just contamination and it doesn't cause disease" out of one side of his mouth, and, "we're concerned about our lab workers" from the other. Guys, you can't have it both ways!!! I wonder if he knows how obvious this was.
:headache::Retro mad::Retro mad:

Laurel, I think this encapsulates the whole mess nicely. They are playing word games calling XMRV a "contaminant" trying to hew to the public relations talking point. They define a retrovirus that everyone admits has been proven to integrate into human DNA in both fresh human cells and human cell lines as a 'contaminant'. Thelr definition of a 'contaminant' sounds a lot like an infectious human retrovirus. And that becomes apparent when they display dismay that this "extraordinarily infectious" "contaminant" has probably infected their lab workers.

 

[Marco]

Human, mouse xenografts.

How likely is it that you could mix together mouse DNA and human prostate tumour DNA and end up with an infectious retrovirus with tropism for human prostate tissue? Or that you graft human tissues into immune deficient mice and then detect MLV related retrovirus in the majority of patients with a neuroimmune disease?

Or that you decide that the XMRV found in prostate cancer and ME/CFS patients is really contamination which you can easily screen out by excluding mouse DNA?

The possibilities are limitless.

 

[justinreilly]

First, this is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that they seemed more than ready to take a quick look and then dismiss this as another CFS dead end. That tune seems to have changed.

As for Enron, Deep Water, Tuskegee, etc. comments. That was in response to your reassurances that those things only happen in the olden days when people were ignorant and the government didn't provided sufficient oversight. I'm saying good luck with that view. There is plenty of evidence to question blind faith in government oversight. And again, it doesn't malice, just self-interest.

Right. A lot of people think we exist 'outside of history' that those things that are now admitted by the govt decades after they occur don't occur now, but they do. Otherwise CIA, nevermind NSA, wouldn't have anything to do! And I'm not rabidly anti-CIA. My uncle is a former deputy CIA director. It's just a fact that historically deception and antidemocratic projects in the perceived interest of the US have been their stock in trade.

I think the mindset that dirty things have to be done to people as a necessary way to 'protect' the interests of the US has probably faded to a certain extent since the 50s, but still remains at the highest levels of government. The US govt isn't a "Skull & Bones production" any more, but vestiges of that influence remain.

The Bushes and Reagan were constitutionally incapable of admitting that the govt did stuff like this. Obama has his hands full and even if he knows, he may think it's too much for the public to handle now if all of the govt's dirty laundry were aired. He also seems to be moving towards the Cheneyesque ideas that some principles may have to be sacrificed in the interest of national security. I sound like a conspiracy nut, but the fact is conspiracies do exist and the weight of the evidence leans heavily toward the whole ME situation being one.

 

[cigana]

Now for some more Devils Advocate hat stuff.

I put forward an alternative XMRV contamination hypothesis on another thread recently. Basically that XMRV was real, but in lab workers and they were contaminating the samples. Since patient samples are handled more, this might mean that patients samples have a risk of real contamination, from a real virus.

This hypothesis has major problems, but fits with the cell line origin theory of XMRV. It also explains why some labs are finding it and not others - those labs have infected lab techs. Labs that don't have infected lab techs can't find the virus.

Bye
Alex

I wonder if the WPI have tested their lab workers.

 

[justinreilly]

If you ever get an explanation please let us know.

It's yet another testament to these scientists' utter lack of connection between what they study in the lab and human suffering. I was actually in contact with a scientist at the conference who believes Deckoff-Jones' recovery could be explained by the placebo effect - what does that tell you about his comprehension of the degree of severity of this condition?

Oh boy, talk about denial!