Serious Pants

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome -- No laughing matter!

The NZ Blood Service intends to refuse blood donations from people who have ever been diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This is all to do with XMRV (Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus), a new virus that is currently flavour of the month in health quackery circles.

Note to self: Check whether our overseas readers know the phrase 'flavour of the month', or is it restricted to Mrs Miggins' Pie Shop? Never sure how well these local idioms travel. Most months it's rabbit's wogglers.

So a research group in Nevada found traces of XMRV in blood samples from cases of CFS. Then the principle investigator from the group confidently announced that XMRV is spreading through the human population via blood transfusions and could be the next HIV. The Australian and Canadian blood services promptly banned CFS people from donating blood, and the NZ service plans to do the same because, well, if Jimmy down the road jumped off the bridge then YES NZ would do the same thing, only it's called 'following best international practice' and no-one here ever lost their job for making a stupid mistake if they can point to enough people overseas who made the same stupid mistake previously.

The report from the Nevada group is now looking increasingly shonky. They equivocate about their methods and the source of the blood samples; other researchers have been unable to replicate the results; there are concerns about contamination. Meanwhile the PI is also looking increasingly like a quack. She's touting XMRV as the cause of autism and buddying up to the anti-vaccination crowd; she's even trying to link XMRV with Chronic Lyme Disease. Crank magnetism, how does it work? Morgellons cannot be far away and I have sent her an invitation to the next meeting of the Imaginary Diseases working group.

This scattergun search for links with every conceivable condition is understandable since the CFS-centric foundation funding this research* has a commercial arm that sells a test for the virus at $650 a pop. This wouldn't necessarily arouse total cynicism until it emerged that the commercial company has teamed up with BioRay (purveyors of colloidal silver and dental-filling-mercury-stabilisers) to rip off the parents of autistic kids, so you know, total GUILT BY ASSOCIATION.

ERV's posts on the ongoing foofarow are worth reading, if only for the totally-invested all-caps quality of some of her commenters, for whom Judy Mikovits is a heroine who has taken on the uncaring medical establishment, and THEY LAUGHED AT GALILEO TOO. But Sciencebasedmedicine is also good.

But wait! VIP-Dx have sent me this false-colour EM image of antiretroviral reverse-transcriptase-inhibitor drugs destroying XMRV viral particles.** OMG, photographic proof, it must be true!

I was going to save the picture for a rant about the recent news about the 2004 guidelines to governments from WHO, advising them to stockpile Tamiflu in preparation for the next influenza pandemic (i.e. the news that of the three scientists who wrote the guidelines, two have been employed as spokesmen for Roche while the third had a "professional relationship" with Roche). Well, not so much recent news since the BMJ article came out in May, but news media are finally beginning to notice it. But the Tamiflu scandal is not linked to Chronic Lymes Disease or health weirdos and OH LOOK SOMETHING SHINY

* Set up by millionaire parents with a CFS child, who have since successfully lobbied the state of Nevada to subsidise their obsessions.

** May include some computer enhancement.