Retroviruses: Dr. Elaine DeFreitas from the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia

[winmsn]

How many people are aware of Dr. Elaine DeFreitas’s CFS virus isolation findings and electron microscope images from the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, USA?

Mainstream medical views fail to solve the problem, and the CDC’s 1988 and 1994 definitions of CFS are completely contradictory.

Why do so many people with CFS blindly accept official narratives and mainstream medical opinions?

Dr. DeFreitas’s virus model explains all CFS symptoms, identifies which medications effectively relieve symptoms, and provides valid drug targets.

Why—why are non-mainstream approaches that could offer help rejected and dismissed by mainstream medicine? Must we keep waiting indefinitely?

 

[jonathan_h]

To provide some additional context for people unsure of who DeFreitas is, here’s an excerpt from my work-in-progress essay on the XMRV saga.

XMRV actually wasn’t the first time a retrovirus had been associated with ME/CFS. 18 years earlier in 1990, researcher Elaine DeFreitas authored a peer-reviewed study which found genes from an apparent novel human retrovirus in 23 of 30 ME/CFS samples and 0 of 20 controls. Like with XMRV, this finding generated significant attention in the media and among scientists—enough that the CDC conducted their own study attempting to replicate the results. When they and other teams failed to find any trace of the virus, her findings were written off by the scientific community as laboratory contamination—as just another rumor virus.

A sizable number of ME/CFS patients, however, remained convinced that DeFreitas’s virus was the cause of ME/CFS and that the CDC, biased towards a psychosomatic view of ME/CFS, had intentionally sabotaged their own research. The most influential proponent of this idea was journalist and person with ME/CFS, Hillary Johnson, who devoted a significant portion of her 1997 book, Osler’s Web, to the idea.

My question to you, @winmsn, assuming I’ve understood you: why has no one else been able to find evidence of this virus?

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Why—why are non-mainstream approaches that could offer help rejected and dismissed by mainstream medicine? Must we keep waiting indefinitely?

Because they did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Nobody else has been able to confirm the findings as far as I know and nobody has explained how a hidden virus would produce the clinicl disease we observe.