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

[Megan]

Framing of the Research Question

No, no, no Dr. Yes. That kind of immune response will not do. Think about it.....That kind of response is not necessarily specific to XMRV and they want something specific to XMRV do they not?

Cort, not having a go here, but I believe the above quote encapsulates a lot of what is wrong with many of the scientific arguments about XMRV/MLV and CFS (including among us patients).

It seems to me many scientists are simply trying to answer the research question "Is XMRV associated with CFS". They are concerned with XMRV not CFS.

If on the other hand they were concerned with CFS they would be asking, "Is XMRV or something other MLV related virus causing CFS? If not XMRV, then what is it in our blood that is reacting in those antibody tests?" THESE are the big questions for us.

As a patient, I really don't care if it's XMRV, ABCD, or MLVZ. I just want them to find what it is as it could ultimately bring treatment for us.

Since the Lo/Alter paper it has been clear that CFS might be about about a group of viruses far wider than XMRV. The WPI have clearly been saying for some time that many of their patients are also infected with other MLV's. But many scientists, such as the ones that sparked this thread, keep focusing XMRV (there would be a big hole in their theory if they didn't!). But so do many of us patients - are we adding to our own problems here?

BTW I think the contamination explanation for differential in the patients vs controls is a weak argument - there are almost 10 studies now (not just CFS) all showing consistent low rates in controls. It seems too amazing to believe that they have all been accidentally contaminated at the same rate.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Go Lord Acton!

Lol he had some DAMN good points

I'm going to ask that you retract that statement. It's a cop-out and its prejudiced. We have just as much of a class system here.

The wonderful old Brit class system....

Yeah *EVERY* society inevitably forms "classes", lol, even the Soviets And yes America is most certainly a very class ridden nation nowadays, which utter shame as it's three founding documents are some of the greatest works of idealism and progress the world has ever seen, sigh.
alas people like making an "us" and "them" outlook, to have someone to look down on etc, meh

Oh on the British Upper Class yes they were morons, their ignorant and arrogant attitudes lead to utter slaughter on the fields of WW1...but...
most of the officer corp, hell damn nearly all of it, came from the upper classes, and their young sons died in DROVES, leading those suicidal charges against machine guns etc. they had appalling causalty ratios, iirc about 5 times greater than the average infantrymen! Standing their waving a pistol instead of a rifle and in a different uniform to squaddies they were sitting ducks!!
Crap, stupid system etc..but they were brave and regardless of their class, such slaughter of people's family is never ever good.
Lot of parks around my area are monuments to fallen sons of minor nobility who died in that retarded war.

My folks are working class and are thus now "superflous to demands" nowadays (those who didn't emigrate) and were treated little better than slaves with the literal "mine shops" using ratbag tactics to keep families in penury, the deaths and injuries in the mines and steelworks were horrendous and left terrible bitterness (ways folk died in the steelworks, often witnessed by my folks are...utterly nightmarish).
Still, those young officers in WW1 did NOT deserve to die for that crap world they were born into :/

Another insight into those times:
Early in WW1, the pompous British sargeants made a mockery of the terribly messy German trenches, with sandbags, rubbish, steel plates and evne paint thrown everywhere!
No, not the British way! men had to polish their cap badges so they gleamed! trench parapets had to be perfectly neat!
So German snipers in their camouflaged and steel barricaded positions, had a field day blowing the idiot British NCO's heads off .

 

[free at last]

Originally Posted by Cort
No, no, no Dr. Yes. That kind of immune response will not do. Think about it.....That kind of response is not necessarily specific to XMRV and they want something specific to XMRV do they not? END

Cort, this over my head, but does not the research here suggest that the cytokine profiles matching, what they saw here in vitro actually suggest that some immune signatures actually do appear to be quite specific, though i do note the word similar is used in the paper? i may be off what i understand from this study. but i remembered it, and thought it was suggesting the opposite to what you was saying to Dr yes. Though as mentioned, my understanding is way to weak, to know. but thought it worth showing to you guys to see what you thought,


Characterization of innate immune responses in Xenotropic Murine Leukemia
Retrovirus-Related Virus (XMRV) infected individuals
J. Mikovits1, V. Lombardi1, K. Hagen1, D. Goetz1, M. Marshall2, I. Barao-Silvestre1
1 Whittemore Peterson Institute, Research, Reno, USA
2 University of Nevada, Microbiology and Immunology, Reno, USA
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a debilitating disease manifested by inflammatory sequelae including innate immune
activation, low natural killer cell numbers and function. We recently demonstrated the first direct isolation of an infectious
gammaretrovirus, XMRV, from the blood of CFS patients. We have developed quantitative assays to detect XMRV
replication and methods for infection in culture. Moreover, we found evidence of XMRV infection in >95% of the 141
CFS patients tested to date. These data implicate a role for XMRV infection in the pathogenesis of CFS. We studied
the interaction of XMRV with the immune system, first by identifying cellular targets of XMRV ex vivo by flow cytometry
(FCM). We hypothesized that NK cells could be a target of infection and that infection of other PBMC cell types could
lead to dysfunction of NK cells either directly or indirectly through the upregulation of inflammatory cytokines and
chemokines, which are also a hallmark of this disease. We isolated leukocytes from XMRV infected individuals analyzed
phenotypic differences from uninfected controls by FCM. Using purified primary B, T monocyte macrophage and dendritic
cells and cell line models we infected with XMRV and profiled cytokine and chemokine expression by Luminex multiplex
assays. We analyzed XMRV infection by quantitative RT-PCR and Intracellular FCM. Infection of PBMC in vitro results in
a cytokine signature similar to that signature seen in the plasma of CFS patients. These data advance our understanding
of the pathogenesis of CFS and may ultimately lead to new therapeutic interventions.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Right. A lot of people think we exist 'outside of history'
*snipped for brevity*
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.

yeah, and hwat happens is that Government_Minister_002 comes into power, elected after Government_Minister_001 got voted out of power
Now, the new guy finds out from civil servants that the previous guy had done somehting utterly appalling! But if the new guy does not keep up the conspiracy of silence on, say Gulf War Syndrome, the resulting FURY from the public will bring down the government, and himself, and he'll get blamed.
How many people have the balls in that circumstances to tell the truth?

Especially as he'd know the media are all mostly corrupt, useless mouthpieces for corporate intersts who own the media AND own the political parties by campaign contributions and also by knowing about criminal or embarassing peccadilos

how many politicians have they caught picking men up in public toilets in airports and kept quiet about for leverage, eh? lol. Note US case of that where it actually came out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Craig#2007_arrest_and_consequences, it was the hypocrisy of the person that made it darkly funny, hehe.
My fave being the anti-gay evangelical who was caught out as having indulged in snorting crystal meth off a male prostitute's ass! haha omg you cannot make this stuff up, it's priceless!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Haggard

so you can well imagine there's a LOT of blackmail held on many officials. People are people: we all have our weaknesses, flaws, screw ups and just plain differences that are societally "incorrect", alas those can be used to manipulate folk by unscrupulous ratbags.

for example several major US newspapers/media outlets sat on, deliberately squashed reports of US activities in the Middle East ebing cirminal, heinous or corrupt, to keep up support for the wars etc.
for example, see VERY nasty situation regarding a "security contractor" being involved in procuring children for prostitution, which the Washington Post hush up
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/12/wikileaks_texas_company_helped.php
(least you HEAR about this kind of stuff in the Western democracies)

ergo: conspiracies go on ALL the damn time. It's literally how the world works, alas. It's just not "Men In Black and Queen of England is a reptilian alien" kind of stuff, lol

 

[markmc20001]

First of all. It's safe to say the crap just hit the fan in a cleanroom! WIsh I had an illustration for that one, but I don't.

Secondly. It is possible that many of the government workers have no idea they are being manipulated. The Special interests have leverage on some key people in the CDC or wherever, and have others that just cooperate for whatever reason.

Everybody else at the CDC and government can probably be kept in the dark with all the bogus science the CDC had been cranking out for all these years, and of course with the help of corporate owned media.

Everybody is waking up now, around the world I might ad, including those who have been hood-winked.

 

[Grape Funk]

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.

I started laughing when you got to this point. It is crazy though, along with the original "false positives" the CDC had, i'm sort of new here and never had gotten the chance to see those charts.

 

[Cort]

Cort, not having a go here, but I believe the above quote encapsulates a lot of what is wrong with many of the scientific arguments about XMRV/MLV and CFS (including among us patients).

It seems to me many scientists are simply trying to answer the research question "Is XMRV associated with CFS". They are concerned with XMRV not CFS.

If on the other hand they were concerned with CFS they would be asking, "Is XMRV or something other MLV related virus causing CFS? If not XMRV, then what is it in our blood that is reacting in those antibody tests?" THESE are the big questions for us.

As a patient, I really don't care if it's XMRV, ABCD, or MLVZ. I just want them to find what it is as it could ultimately bring treatment for us.

Since the Lo/Alter paper it has been clear that CFS might be about about a group of viruses far wider than XMRV. The WPI have clearly been saying for some time that many of their patients are also infected with other MLV's. But many scientists, such as the ones that sparked this thread, keep focusing XMRV (there would be a big hole in their theory if they didn't!). But so do many of us patients - are we adding to our own problems here?

All good points. I agree the big picture for us is always 'What is causing CFS?" and those antibody results could be pointing in a fruitful direction. I hate to say - to be always a bearer of bad tidings but I talked to someone in the field who felt, believe it or not, that they're weren't pointing to MLV's but might be pointing to a common virus. Even if that's still an indication of something pathogenic going on.

The flip side of the antibody question is that few groups are finding increased antibody levels either - which is kind of weird because that is an entirely different situation from PCR. Nobody is suggesting that the antibodies are contaminants. So why is there the discrepancy? Its an odd situation.

The WPI looked for antibodies to an MLV protein that they thought should be in XMRV. Later antibody tests have looked for antibodies to that protein and more that are specifically associated with XMRV. They should be picking up the MLV antibodies but for some reason they haven't.....

There's no real good news on that front. I think later studies have been incorporating the Alter/Lo findings into the picture - have to check though.

 

[Cort]

Originally Posted by Cort
No, no, no Dr. Yes. That kind of immune response will not do. Think about it.....That kind of response is not necessarily specific to XMRV and they want something specific to XMRV do they not? END

Cort, this over my head, but does not the research here suggest that the cytokine profiles matching, what they saw here in vitro actually suggest that some immune signatures actually do appear to be quite specific, though i do note the word similar is used in the paper? i may be off what i understand from this study. but i remembered it, and thought it was suggesting the opposite to what you was saying to Dr yes. Though as mentioned, my understanding is way to weak, to know. but thought it worth showing to you guys to see what you thought,

For sure they could be specific and I imagine, if XMRV works out they will be shown to be specific. Its just the problem right now is convincing the research world that XMRV is real and the only way to do that is to for other labs to match the WPI's antibody and PCR results because those should be at least very specific for XMRV. A test showing a pattern of immune activation doesn't denote what pathogen caused it. To determine that they have to show pathogen specific PCR/antibody results.

I wonder if there are any efforts to do the entire culture tests. I imagine there are and the BWG appears to have included them in their next round.

 

[Cort]

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)

Remember that this is the spiked sample - the samples in which they spiked them with a certain amount of XMRV and then looked for it and all the labs showed they could the virus when that was done. When you move to patients samples only the WPI and the CDC (ironically), in a few instances, were able to do that with the PCR test. Yes, theoretically - based on the above chart they all should have been able to find it. I think that was confusing to them and everybody...theoretically everybody should be finding it.

That was why they started looking a storage and processing issues. I think there's still one outstanding issue but they basically felt there wasn't a problem with storage and sample processing and have moved forward.

 

[Cort]

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

My mouth gaped open....I felt like I was back in the, whatever, 'middle ages' when it was OK to publically make comments like that...

 

[Cort]

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. : )

Well if Cingoz and Coffin and Stoye are right then it all started at Case Western University sometime between 1996-1999 - as these researchers built the first cell line to use to study prostate cancer. For all the grief it may have caused - and we shall see about that - it's been used alot - its been mentioned in over 200 citations since then.

In Vitro Cell Dev Biol Anim. 1999 Jul-Aug;35(7):403-9.
A new human prostate carcinoma cell line, 22Rv1.
Sramkoski RM, Pretlow TG 2nd, Giaconia JM, Pretlow TP, Schwartz S, Sy MS, Marengo SR, Rhim JS, Zhang D, Jacobberger JW.

Cancer Research Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106, USA.

Abstract

A cell line has been derived from a human prostatic carcinoma xenograft, CWR22R. This represents one of very few available cell lines representative of this disease. The cell line is derived from a xenograft that was serially propagated in mice after castration-induced regression and relapse of the parental, androgen-dependent CWR22 xenograft. Flow cytometric and cytogenetic analysis showed that this cell line represents one hyper DNA-diploid stem line with two clonal, evolved cytogenetic sublines. The basic karyotype is close to that of the grandparent xenograft, CWR22, and is relatively simple with 50 chromosomes. In nude mice, the line forms tumors with morphology similar to that of the xenografts, and like the parental CWR22 and CWR22R xenografts, this cell line expresses prostate specific antigen. Growth is weakly stimulated by dihydroxytestosterone and lysates are immunoreactive with androgen receptor antibody by Western blot analysis. Growth is stimulated by epidermal growth factor but is not inhibited by transforming growth factor-beta1.[/B]

 

[free at last]

For sure they could be specific and I imagine, if XMRV works out they will be shown to be specific. Its just the problem right now is convincing the research world that XMRV is real and the only way to do that is to for other labs to match the WPI's antibody and PCR results because those should be at least very specific for XMRV. A test showing a pattern of immune activation doesn't denote what pathogen caused it. To determine that they have to show pathogen specific PCR/antibody results.

I wonder if there are any efforts to do the entire culture tests. I imagine there are and the BWG appears to have included them in their next round.

One thing seems certain about the culture studys in the BWG phase 3, i would be very surprised if all labs dont correlate probably 100% because what are we talking about here, growing the virus in a dish, either it shows up, and its a positive result, or it does not, and its negative. How can any of the labs mess this one up i wonder ?

Important point here Cort, if these immune signatures compared well in vitro, to paitents samples, then how can that be, from a standpoint of a live virus contaminating blood samples, that just doesnt make a lot of sense, because if this is really correlating, then xmrv is indeed in humans. or the correlation has nothing to do with xmrv but something else ? seems too much of a coincedence though, that in vitro its behaving in a similair manner to patients.

I find that very hard to dimiss or explain. the only way you can explain that surely, is there is another virus mimicking xmrv ? very weird. seems a bit unlikely

 

[lansbergen]

All good points. I agree the big picture for us is always 'What is causing CFS?" and those antibody results could be pointing in a fruitful direction. I hate to say - to be always a bearer of bad tidings but I talked to someone in the field who felt, believe it or not, that they're weren't pointing to MLV's but might be pointing to a common virus. Even if that's still an indication of something pathogenic going on.

To what common virus do this antibodies to a gamma retrovirus protein point?

With which protein of that common virus does the gamma antibody crossreact?

Are antibody tests for this common virus available?

 

[Navid]

thanks DB....My outrage matches yours. I sent a scathing Note to that "AIDS" woman and stoye...it was very cathartic.

 

[August59]

Well if Cingoz and Coffin and Stoye are right then it all started at Case Western University sometime between 1996-1999 - as these researchers built the first cell line to use to study prostate cancer. For all the grief it may have caused - and we shall see about that - it's been used alot - its been mentioned in over 200 citations since then.

This doesn't mean that no one could have been infected with XMRV before 1996 - 1999? I must have missed something.

 

[LaurelW]

That's what I've been wondering too, and someone on another thread mentioned--what about all those outbreaks in the 80s????

 

[jace]

Remember Alter and Lo's samples at the NIH? 15 year old samples, with MuLV-related fragments? In patients with ME/CFS? And when some of those same patients were retested last year, they still had the infection, though slightly mutated, as one would expect with a HGRV?

Fifteen years - that takes us to 1996. Never mind DeFreitas's findings from more than five years earlier.

This "origin is lab recombinant" argument will not last long, IMHO.

 

[Ernie]

If this is indeed was from Judy, hopefully there was permission to post.

 

[August59]

The people on here that have been sick for 20 or more years couldn't have up and got infected 10 years or more after the became sick. The 1996 - 1999 theory is impossible in my eyes or virutually impossible.

What if Alex theory is correct. What if the virus has gone undetected in the human population for so long, that in fact humans have passed the virus back into the labs. We have 7% and probably more of healthy humans infected. Why does PWC's test so high? Maybe we have a genetic flaw that allows XMRV to wreak havoc on our bodies, especially when co-infections are present. We have been subjected to a lot more vaccines in the last 20 years or so (I'm not saying the vaccines carry the virus), but they could expose a weak link in our immune system possibly. Look at all the environmental things we could have been exposed to (pesticides, herbcides, overly processed chemical laden foods and all BPA's) exerted a tremendous load on our immune systems. Just an idea.

How do they know that the xenograft wasn't contaminated by a lab worker. I'm not buying this contamination thing completely. The virus is there and if it is proven to be infectious, does it matter where it came from? I don't care just get it out of me!!! (at least make it behave)

 

[CBS]

That's what I've been wondering too, and someone on another thread mentioned--what about all those outbreaks in the 80s????

The natural world outside of these institutions is one very large lab all on its own.