BRITISH INVASION

Here's my published letter on "Fighting for a Cause," the recent profile on XMRV researcher Dr. Judy Mikovits in the British publication Nature News.

I have to address the odd comment by [British retrovirologist] Greg Towers, who said of Harvey Alter: "He doesn't get variation, he gets a totally different virus." Harvey Alter would beg to differ. I interviewed him about his XMRV study for my blog, CFS Central. 

Alter [the NIH researcher who, along with Shyh-Ching Lo, found XMRV related viruses in CFS patients] said that he does indeed believe that his group and Mikovits’s group are looking at the same retrovirus.  “Viruses tend not to be homogeneous,” Alter explained.  “The fact that we didn’t find XMRV doesn’t bother me because we already knew that retroviruses tend to be variable. They mutate a lot, basically. This is true of HIV and HCV [hepatitis C virus]. It’s not one virus. It’s a family of viruses.” 

Alter is far more than “a hepatitis expert” that [reporter] Callaway describes.  He's a Lasker Award winner--his NIH research led to the discovery of hepatitis C--and he developed methods to screen for hepatitis, essentially eradicating the risk of acquiring hepatitis from donor blood.  Clearly, Harvey Alter is capable of speaking for himself, so it certainly begs the question:  Why didn’t Ewen Callaway ask him?

Earlier in his article, Callaway wrote: “The authors delayed publication of both papers for several weeks to assess discrepancies.” This statement is not correct. The authors didn’t delay publication. In a highly unusual move, as reported in the Wall Street Journal on June 30, 2010, higher-ups at Health and Human Services (HHS) put these two XMRV studies on hold, one by the CDC and another by Alter and the FDA’s Shyh-Ching Lo.

HHS officials wanted the two groups to reach a consensus, the Wall Street Journal reported, or at least determine how they arrived at different conclusions, a highly unusual move. 

Scientists disagree all the time, especially with new findings. That’s one reason why pulling the Alter/Lo paper appears to be more about politics than science, particularly because in an abrupt about-face the CDC, which didn’t find XMRV in CFS patients, published its study a day after the Wall Street Journal article, on July 1. So much for reaching consensus.

Alter and Lo, who did find XMRV-related retroviruses, were asked to conduct more research, and their study was finally published August 23.

What makes this case even more unusual is that the Alter/Lo paper had already been accepted by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences when it was pulled. I interviewed the journal's editor-in-chief, Randy Schekman, for CFS Central. He said that putting a paper on hold had occurred only one other time that he knew of in his nearly four-year tenure at the journal.  

Given these highly unusual events, the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community is concerned that government health officials have been behaving more like politicians than scientists. Indeed, Bill Reeves, the former head of CFS research at the CDC, told the New York Times after the Mikovits paper came out: “We and others are looking at our own specimens and trying to confirm it [XMRV]. If we validate it, great. My expectation is that we will not.” 

As far as the XMRV negative papers are concerned, Nature News missed key facts.  For instance, rather than do a true replication study that reproduces precisely the methods and patient cohort of the Science study--something students learn in 9th grade science--the CDC as well as the Dutch and British researchers chose not to.

In addition, many of the patients these researchers are studying don’t have CFS, but have in fact idiopathic fatigue and depression, as confirmed by the research of Leonard Jason of DePaul University.

Mikovits’s study as well as Alter and Lo’s, however, did look at patients with bona fide CFS.

No one yet knows the role of XMRV in CFS, and no one will ever know until scientists examine the correct cohort and reproduce precisely the methods of the Mikovits study.