STEVEN SALZBERG'S PSEUDOSCIENCE

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Today Forbes' Dr. Steven Salzberg joined the XMRV naysayers, penning the piece "Chronic fatigue syndrome: virus hypothesis collapses further."  Salzberg took a step further, labeling Dr. Judy Mikovits a "pseudoscientist." He's the same Steven Salzberg who doesn't believe there's an autism epidemic but does believe that acupuncture is nonsense. Surely a front-runner for columnist Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World award, Salzberg is not exactly an outside-the-box thinker. 

Below is my letter to the editor:

As a science reporter and blogger, I was disappointed to read Steven Salzberg’s article. Dr. Salzberg, if you’d sit down and read all the “replications” of the 2009 Science study in their entirety, you’d realize they’re not replications. 

The essence of the scientific method is reproducing precisely the methods and patient cohort of the original study, something most of us learn in 9th grade science. 

None of these so-called replications meet that standard. The Levy study didn’t replicate the methods of the 2009 Science study.  The Centers for Disease Control's study and the British XMRV studies examined patients with idiopathic fatigue and depression, not CFS, which is a neuroimmune disease that causes acquired immune abnormalities, including natural killer cell dysfunction--the CFS counterpart to HIV’s T-cell depletion.

CFS also causes seizures, abnormal brain scans, rare cancers and autonomic dysfunction, leading to abrupt drops in blood pressure upon sitting or standing.

Both the CDC’s study and the British studies weeded out anyone with neuroimmune or autonomic dysfunction. The work of Dr. Leonard Jason at DePaul University has established that the CDC and the British scientists are studying the wrong cohorts. 

Moving on, the Mikovits study found antibody reactions to XMRV in patients. You don't get an antibody reaction to a contaminant.  Morever, only 4 percent of controls in the Mikovits study tested positive for XMRV, while 67 percent of patients tested positive. If XMRV were contamination, one would expect an equal distribution. 

Science seems hell bent on consensus, but as Harvard-educated physician and medical thriller writer Dr. Michael Crichton once pronounced: “Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right....”

Sadly, the history of science is replete with investigators who were discredited by the status quo but who were eventually proved right:  Galileo, Semmelweis, Pasteur, Ohm, Nott, Zweig and Rous, to name a few.

In 1982, Drs. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren discovered that H. pylori was the cause of stomach ulcers. In the early 20th century, there had been interest in an ulcer link to the spiral-shaped bacterium until a large 1954 U.S. study failed to find it in stomach biopsies, delaying the discovery for 28 years.

Whether Dr. Mikovits is right is anyone’s guess. But asking her to withdraw her paper before the truth is known is the antithesis of science.  Doing “replications” that aren’t bona fide replications is the antithesis of science. 

As far as patients taking anti-retrovirals, all drugs have risks, but several CFS patients I’ve interviewed have been helped by these medications.  Their natural killer cell numbers, for instance, have normalized and a few have largely recovered. Patients responding to anti-retrovirals would put a serious kink in the XMRV contamination theory, which is one reason some believe that these researchers are determined to get patients off them.

Given that physicians are now prescribing anti-retrovirals to healthy HIV-negative people in high-risk groups, I find it particularly unsettling that the researchers who’ve conducted these non-replication XMRV studies are admonishing desperate and dying CFS patients that they have to be wait for treatment. In fact, CFS patients have been waiting for decades; many have died waiting. There is not one approved drug for CFS--and none in the offing.  The government spends only $6 million a year on CFS, a million more than it spends on hay fever. 

Approximately one-third of the parents with CFS whom I’ve interviewed have children with autism. This is not chimera; there is a connection here.

Twenty years ago, the first evidence of a retrovirus in CFS patients surfaced at the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.  Back then, the CDC refused to replicate the methods of Wistar’s Dr. Elaine DeFreitas. When the CDC couldn’t replicate her findings, the research died. Two decades later, it’s deja vu all over again.

I believe, Dr. Salzberg, that you’d do your readers a greater service if you would read the studies in their entirety and learn about the history of this disease, instead of spinning misinformation.