Ruscetti Acknowledges Reuse of WB Image

@Bob:

My opinion of the PACE trial?

First, that it is irrelevant to discussions about the 'science' of XMRV.

Second, that it showed pretty much what they claim - that Cognitive Behavior and Graded Exercise therapies cause moderate improvement in outcomes for people with ME/CFS, but are not cures, while Adaptive Pacing does not. Further, I think that the results of PACE tell us nothing at all about the causes of ME/CFS.

"A prejudice is a prejudgment, an assumption made about someone or something before having adequate knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy", at this point very few probably have the information to make a nonprejudiced judgement on this matter, as we dont have the information to make a judgement that isnt, so attacks can hardly not be prejudiced.

Lee,

I hope that as someone who has watched a dear friend suffer with this illness, you are equally concerned by the way that each time a retrovirus has been linked to ME the research has been prematurely curtailed, the researcher's reputation destroyed and funding withdrawn.

I am sure you are familiar with these episodes from the recent past which are well known to people with ME

I suspect that even if money turns out to have been "wasted" on XMRV, it was not money that would have been spent on anything else that is ME or CFS related. Indeed, that spending has drawn attention to the issues and led a lot of researchers to have another look at ME and CFS. About the only negative, presuming the argument that XMRV research was a waste is correct (something I do not concede), is that some research funds that could have been spent on something else wasn't. Given the size of redirection of funds allocated to CFS research in the past into other endeavours, I doubt this could have even come close to redressing the balance. In terms of the massive underfunding on ME and CFS it is not even a blip on the radar toward parity.

MS is a worthy disease that I think is still underfunded. While more lethal than ME it is less disabling on average according to three morbidity rankings I have read over the years. It is also less common. Yet in one year MS gets more research money than ME has ever had, by which I mean the total funding since the 1930s epidemics. If MS research is underfunded, what does that make ME research?

The real issue is a lack of interest and funding, period. The huge sums wasted on the PACE study for example could have been far more beneficial if they investigated immunological issues instead.

Bye, Alex

@ ukxmrv:

Silverman? I think he showed definitively that the positive 'XMLV' PCR results were due to plasmid contamination, and confirmed that the early criticisms that the sequences were too similar to the plasmid, and didn't show enough sequence diversity, were correct.

I also think that his reported protections against contamination were stunningly thorough.

I also note that the contaminating plasmids were found in ME/CFS samples and not in healthy controls. This was the result that made me personally sit up and go 'hmmmm.' This is NOT a pattern that one sees with PCR contamination - this is a sample handling issue - at best, patient samples were handled differently from control samples, in a way that caused contamination of patient samples.

I think n evaluating the Silverman retraction, one must also look at JM's claimed ability to reliably find XMRV in patients and only at low levels in controls - and the fact that they were unable to do so when samples were blinded.

Put all this together, and the only conclusion I can find is that - AT BEST - JM's lab were guilty of handling patient samples differently from control samples, in ways that caused contamination of patient samples but not controls.

And given this - I don't believe a thing she has reported. She is - at best - too sloppy to be trusted.

Hello Lee,

Thank you for responding. The PACE Trial is very relevant to ME patients. That's why I asked you.

I can see that you have not carried out an equally critical analysis of the PACE Trial, as you are taking its conclusions at face value.

In fact, CBT made no difference to average physical disability, however it is erroneously promoted as having a 30-40% 'recovery' rate.

Only up to 16% of participants could be said to have responded in any way (by at least a minimal amount) to GET and CBT, and that's if we accept the methodology used, and the interpretation of the data, which are both demonstrably flawed.

On average, all patients were left with severe disability, with minimal improvement (at best) at the end of the trial.

Severely affected patients did not respond to psychological interventions in the PACE Trial's sister project, the FINE Trial.

Did you know that up to 60% of ME patients are harmed by GET, as reported in patient surveys?

I am just telling you this because you say that you are very concerned about the health of ME patients, for which I am grateful.

Add to this the worrying fact that so many labs are contaminated with XMRV, which risks lab workers' health, and risks contaminating vaccines. Add to this the multiple positive prostate cancer studies.

I've been "forced" by the insurance company to do a program of GET and CBT for 4 months, they were the worst of my life and it disabled me even more until today. Anybody doing a study and claiming those two are beneficial for real cases of CFS (especially advanced ones like me) is (best case scenario) doing very bad science.

Funny thing is they said in their reports that made significant progress in the 4 months, despite me telling them how wrong it was.

Sorry to intrude but what the heck has the PACE Trial got to do with the subject matter of this Thread?

Damned ridiculous.

Speaking as an ME patient, a heck of a lot in my opinion, Firestormm.

Are you not bewildered by the amount of attention that the Lombardi paper has attracted, in terms of people wanting to expose 'bad science', compared with the total lack of interest that the PACE Trial has attracted from people who say they are interested in exposing 'bad science'. And yet the PACE Trial is a systematic abuse of the truth, and a hundred times worse than the single flaw that has been found in the Lombardi study.

I find it incredible. I also find it insulting. And I am feeling increasingly irritated about it.

I think I'm right as an ME patient to highlight this contradiction. And I will continue to do so, and to draw attention to the PACE Trial, whilst non-patients are posting with righteous 'anger' about the XMRV study, whilst they are sanguine, impassive, uncritical, or ignorant, in relation to the PACE Trial.

Thank you Bob. You are absolutely correct.

It shows the selective bias of some of the non-ME people who come to this forum to comment critically on the recent XMRV developments and tend to have the same viewpoint. I've not said that very well. It's not their fault that the media has only been covering some areas - (and if it is the media that they are getting information on ME from)

We have had few family members or friends join us here with a passion to discover if their loved ones have a HGRV. For some reason we seem to be attracting one sort of viewpoint and I don't know why.

We would like them to care about other areas that need their "anger".

(and this forum is open to public viewing so it's a good opportunity for we patients to put things into perspective and hopefully get more of these people interested in the medical travesty of PACE and the wider issues that ME patients feel their own anger and disappointment about)

Yes Esther, precisely... people are too lazy or not interested in finding out what really matters for ME patients... But that doesn't make it wrong to inform people.

Lee expressed an interest in exposing 'bad science'. He said it made him angry, especially in relation to ME. And he seems to have a lot of energy. So I was just introducing him to an area of 'bad science' that I personally think is more important that banging on about a possible flaw in the XMRV study.

So I was only gently encouraging someone who is interested in 'science', and who is angry at 'bad science', and who has an interest in the welfare of ME patients, to take an interest in other areas of ME research. I'd be grateful for any help we can get in exposing the PACE Trial.

There may be serious mistakes in what's left of the Science paper. But we don't know that. To say so is speculation.

Even if there are further mistakes, XMRV is a real virus that infects human tissue and that contaminates many labs. And XMRV also infects prostate cancer patients, according to a number of studies.

So I wouldn't call any research into this virus 'wasted money'.

It has also bought a lot of new researchers into the field of ME. Lipkin and Alter, for example, had barely heard of ME before they became involved in XMRV, but now they are both enthusiastically following research avenues, with fresh research money.

So your concerns are misplaced.



On the question of hope and being 'misled'... Thank you for your caring but slightly patronising and patriarchal comments.

I suppose the question is: "Is it better to have some false hope, than no hope?" And that's a question that can't be answered except by the individual affected.

[This post is not directed at any on person. It is something I feel like saying.]

I'd like to point out that failed trials or studies are not automatically bad science.
They are part of the scientific process to study something objectively (we hope) and determine whether it pans out or not.

In the case of XMRV it was not necessarily wasted time and money. It has brought to light the very srong likelihood that HGRVs or
some human retrovirus is a major part of the immune disturbance in ME.

I am really starting to get tired of the people taking XMRV as the axis of their argument against RVs or anything else, when a year ago it was determined that it was a family of retroviruses, not XMRV that was implicated. Further study to really nail down that theory was not ill-spent.

Good science should always be willing to investigate, thoroughly assess, and unabashedly admit to a theory proving out or not.
Societally we have looked upon these outcomes as failures or successes, but the only failure is when we fail to look at a potential problem or solution out of *fear* of failing, or *fear* of social and economic shunning. That is bad science: the unwillingness to look at an inconvenient, or perplexing, or uncertain data set.

Science is absolutely no longer pure. So putting your faith 100% in science, and ignoring the political, financial, and corporate
influences that are very real, is almost like believing in the Wizard of Oz.

I have no answer for it all except to be willing to read between some lines, and pull back curtains wherever possible.

Good points Leela.

If a scientist honestly follows a lead, and carries out their work diligently, then even if their work ends up being proved incorrect, based on further knowledge, then it is not 'bad science'. It is just science in progress. Science learns from past mistakes as well as past successes.

@Bob:
"On the question of hope and being 'misled'" I was referring specifically to my friend, who is spitting-nails angry right now.

@leela:
"In the case of XMRV it was not necessarily wasted time and money. It has brought to light the very srong likelihood that HGRVs or
some human retrovirus is a major part of the immune disturbance in ME."

Actually, given that we now know that they were using 5AZA without reporting it (until the Ottowa conference, in a slide, apparently) we don't know, and cant know, if any of the alleged HGRV results are real.

That's why this is bad science. Not because it didn't work out - lots of good science doesn't work out. It's bad science because it was badly done and badly reported. If they were using 5AZA without telling anyone, and not doing proper controls, then it is possible, maybe likely, that much of the non-PCR results they have reported are simply an artifact of the 5AZA treatment. And they have admitted that they didn't think it was important to let us know about the 5AZA treatment, so we don't know, and we can't know.

JM has shown with the 'blind' results that she cant repeat her own PCR results unless she knows what the answer 'should' be. We know that she has been unwilling to let anyone else have access to her experimental materials to make independent tests for contamination. We know that she failed to reveal a key experimental detail, the 5AZA treatment, this we do know can cause exactly the kind of artifacts that she is reporting as results, and that in the one place she revealed that usage, she did not do the key control, for those artifacts.

Nothing she has done, it is now clear, can be trusted.

At this point, given these issues, nothing that JM has done or reported is credible evidence for any virus, XMLV or HGRV or otherwise.

BTW, I'm not commenting more on the PACE trial because I am not a clinician, and do not have the expertise to easily evaluate that work - and because it is completely irrelevant to the results of the alleged XMLV work. I am an (out of practice) molecular biologist and geneticist, and I do have enough expertise to easily and quickly understand these issues. What I see, each new emerging contaminant and changed label and changed interpretation and previously-unreported experimental detail, makes me really angry.