Director of NIH to open XMRV Conference
By XMRV Global Action
Sat Sept 4 7:03pm
Even bigger news on the XMRV/Murine Leukemia Related Virus front: Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health (overseeing an annual budget of ~$31+ Billion) will be giving the opening workshop at the 1st International XMRV conference.
He will be joined by Stuart LeGrice, head of the Center of Excellence in HIV/AIDS and cancer virology at the National Cancer Institutes, who was famously quoted in the Wall St. Journal last October: “NCI is responding (to XMRV) like it did in the early days of HIV.”
As patient bloggers have been commenting, this suggests the NIH and indeed NCI are taking XMRV/MLV very seriously indeed.
With Francis Collins’ very visible participation at this conference, the speculation (emphasis on speculation) is that one or both of the following might have happened:
• XMRV/MLV’s have been proven (behind the scenes) to cause aggressive familial prostate cancer and/or ME/CFS/Mantle Cell Lymphoma, and possibly other neuro-immune disorders
• XMRV/MLV’s have been confirmed to be transmissible in blood products
Given the early prevalence rates in healthy blood donors of 3-7% cited by Dr Harvey Alter (discoverer of the Hep-C virus), this ultra-high-level attention is perhaps not surprising. Plus there is the element of potential scandal, since ME/CFS patients have been complaining of profound viral symptoms (and dropping dead from viral cardiomyopathies and rare lymphomas) for decades – while being derided as hypochondriacs.
With the personal attention of the NIH director, will research funds will be prioritized to XMRV/MLV research and clinical trials?
The program can be downloaded from here.