XMRV and CFS – It’s not the end (Retrovirology articles overstate case against XMRV link to CFS)

Yesterday the Chicago Tribune published my reaction to the four papers on the retrovirus XMRV published this week in the journal Retrovirology. I was quoted as saying ”These four papers are probably the beginning of the end of XMRV and CFS”. I wish to retract this statement and explain my reasons for doing so.

Upon re-reading three of the four Retrovirology papers it became clear to me that they show that identification of XMRV can be fraught with contamination problems, but they do not imply that previously published studies are compromised by these findings. Clearly any new studies done on XMRV should keep in mind the potential for contamination from PCR kits and murine nucleic acids.

My conclusion is that these four papers point out how identification of XMRV from human specimens can be complicated by contamination, but they do not mean that previous studies were compromised. They serve as an important reminder that future experiments to identify XMRV need to be appropriately controlled to ensure that the results are not compromised by contamination.

In other words, these four papers are NOT the beginning of the end of XMRV and CFS. Rather, research on the role of this virus in human disease must proceed, with large, case-controlled epidemiological studies, as suggested by others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Racaniello

Vincent R. Racaniello (born January 2, 1953 in Paterson, New Jersey) is a Higgins Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons[1]. He is one of four virologists who has recently authored Principles of Animal Virology [2], a respected textbook used by many teaching virology to undergraduate, medical and post-graduate students. As an esteemed member of the scientific community, Racaniello has received several awards including Irma T. Hirschl, Searle Scholars, Eli Lilly and NIH Merit. He has also been a Harvey Society Lecturer at Rockefeller University, the Hilleman Lecturer at the University of Chicago, and University Lecturer at Columbia University. Racaniello has served on the editorial boards of scientific journals, including the Journal of Virology [3], and is a community editor for the open access journal PLOS Pathogens.

I believe he made an honest mistake and his retraction was completely voluntary. I only posted the key retraction portion of his article. If you read his whole piece, he explains how he basically got taken in by the overstatement of the claims made in the Hue paper. Those claims were trumpeted by the Brit anti-XMRV lobby and the enabling BBC and Guardian who are invested in keeping CFS a psych illness to avoid having the bankrupt NHS pay for anti-retroviral treatments (IMO).

Fortunately, Amy Dockser Markus, the WSJ journalist (actually following journalistic principles) had been following this story of XMRV and CFS and called and e-mailed the leading scientists who established the original link to CFS as well as one of the co-authors of two of the Retrovirology papers and they told her that all that these papers showed was that _some_ investigators had problems with contamination, but that their research did not justify a claim that the XMRV link to CFS had been debunked.

Prof. Racaniello was live blogging on the Chicago Tribune website after his initial negative comments were published and he got hammered by some high level colleagues and smart CFS activists. Finally one of the co-authors of the original 2006 paper that discovered XMRV and linked it to prostate cancer said that his lab proved that XMRV was incorporated in human DNA in the prostate, which would not be possible for a contaminant. Dr. Judy Mikovits also chimed in that her lab also proved that she had cultured XMRV from a CFS patient and then infected a human cell line with the XMRV. This is not possible with a mouse contaminant

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