XMRV Link to CFS
For continually updated information on the XMRV virus and it's possible link with CFS visit http://www.cfids.org/xmrv/default.asp .
In the Oct. 8, 2009 issue of Science Express, researchers at the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), the Cleveland Clinic and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) led by Vincent Lombardi, PhD, reported that 67% of 101 chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients tested positive for infection with xenotropic murine leukemia related-virus retrovirus (XMRV), a gammaretrovirus associated with a subset of prostate cancer. Only 3.7% of 218 healthy subjects tested were positive for the virus.
On Aug. 23, 2010, a team of researchers from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Harvard Medical School published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) linking CFS to a related but different group of polytropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (PMLV) sequences.
These published results provide evidence of the association of at least a subset of CFS cases with retroviruses, a hypothesis formed in the mid-1980s and pursued by several independent research groups. XMRV was discovered and detected in a subset of prostate cancer patients’ tumor cells in 2006. Polytropic MLVs had not been linked to other human diseases prior to the 2010 PNAS report.
From http://www.cfids.org/xmrv/default.asp (The CFIDS Association of America)