No sendoff today, instead some strange news to discuss. A few days back, Data_Jack was kind enough to alert me to a new post at ERV, which briefly mentioned that Judy Mikovits will be presenting about XMRV at the AUTISMONE conference.
A little background. Mikovits is the lead researcher on the XMRV study done by the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI). Austimone.org lionizes the now completely discredited Andrew Wakefield, as well as the eminently irrelevant Jenny McCarthy, in their efforts to continue frightening parents with bad science about a nonexistent link between vaccines and autism. Given that the CFS-XMRV link itself is still utterly tenuous, I was somewhat alarmed to see that Mikovits has moved on to autism.
And with good reason, as it turns out. I did a little searching about XMRV and autism, and found this article from another bastion of antivax lunacy, the Huffington Post. In it, Mikovits is quoted as follows (emphasis mine):
“On that note, if I might speculate a little bit,” she said, “This might even explain why vaccines would lead to autism in some children, because these viruses live and divide and grow in lymphocytes — the immune response cells, the B and the T cells. So when you give a vaccine, you send your B and T cells in your immune system into overdrive. That’s its job. Well, if you are harboring one virus, and you replicate it a whole bunch, you’ve now broken the balance between the immune response and the virus. So you have had the underlying virus, and then amplified it with that vaccine, and then set off the disease, such that your immune system could no longer control other infections, and created an immune deficiency.”
What. The. Fuck.
What is Mikovits up to, not only cozying up to one of the largest dangers to public health — the antivax movement — but spouting their party line that has no basis in scientific fact? What respectable scientist would perpetuate this myth, even with that gutless “I’m just speculating” caveat?
Here is the abstract for her presentation:
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) share common clinical features including immune dysregulation, increased oxidative stress, increased expression of proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines, mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic active microbial infections suggesting an underlying immune deficiency may be involved in subgroups of CFS and ASD. We recently demonstrated the first direct isolation of an infectious gammaretrovirus, XMRV, from the blood of CFS patients. We have developed quantitative assays to detect XMRV replication and infection in cell culture. Moreover, we found evidence of XMRV infection in >85% of more than 200 CFS patients tested to date. These data implicate a role for XMRV infection in the pathogenesis of CFS. Because of the clinical similarities of CFS and ASD, we hypothesized that XMRV infection may also be detected in subgroups of ASD. This presentation will update the status of XMRV research, show evidence of XMRV infection in ASD and discuss the implications of XMRV infection in the pathogenesis of neuroimmune disease including ASD.
Funny that the abstract promises to mention “evidence of XMRV infection in ASD” while leaving out any mention of the fact that XMRV is found in a percentage of healthy controls as well. (Aside from the WPI’s study, here’s a Japanese one that discovered the same thing.) Given this, I might expect that there’s evidence of XMRV infection in people with anemia, bipolar disorder, acne, a slight cough, myopia, etc. But because CFS patients and ASD patients share some symptoms, Mikovits is presenting at an antivax autism conference on the hypothesis — I see no study listed here that will be presented — that XMRV is involved.
CFS also shares symptoms with fibromyalgia, lupus, MS, and many other illnesses. Can we expect to see Mikovits presenting at conferences for all these diseases, sharing her speculation that XMRV is involved with all of them as well? Or has she simply identified another vulnerable, gullible population on which to push her extraordinarily premature agenda?
I wrote to the WPI this week about my concerns. As of this post, I have not received a reply. At the moment, therefore, I’m not seeing anything here to be positive about. If Mikovits is so eager to connect her research to a dangerous and fallacious area of “investigation,” my already iffy feelings about the WPI and the future of XMRV and CFS have plunged even further towards total pessimism.
I’m worried that patients are leaping onto the XMRV bandwagon before the science is anywhere close to verifying not only the presence of the retrovirus in CFS patients, but even whether it can be treated at all. It seems to me that since we’ve been relegated to trying alternative and even fringe treatments if we want to find relief, the idea of a science-based answer is so attractive that the actual scientific process is being ignored.