same old schtick trying to downplay the recent XMRV findings, but it
actually makes a good point from what I can tell- namely that because
XMRV is so widespread(the Science study put it at 3.7%, which would
equate to somewhere around 10 million people in the US alone), that
just because someone is positive for XMRV doesn't tell a clinician or
researcher a whole lot. How do you determine out of all the XMRV
positive individuals who's sick and who's not? It still leaves us with
definitions and criterias- Fukuda vs. Canadian vs. Empirical...we're
not out of the woods yet!
******************************
Letters: 'Virus and Chronic Fatigue'
Published: October 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/health/20lett-1-VIRUSANDCHRO_LETTERS.html
To the Editor:
Re =93Is a Virus the Cause of Fatigue Syndrome?=94 (Oct. 13): Even if the
answer is yes, a test for XMRV is unlikely to be clinically useful,
nor is it likely to provide objective validation for those suffering
from chronic fatigue.
The positive predictive value of the test (the proportion of positive
tests that truly detect a disease) is likely to be 10 percent or
worse. If one million patients have the condition and two-thirds of
them carry the virus, but 3 percent to 4 percent of the other 300
million without the disease have also been infected, the correctly
labeled patients will be swamped by more than 10 million asymptomatic
carriers.
False hopes are raised by false positive results when laboratory
results are hyped prematurely.
David Seidenwurm, M.D.
Sacramento
The writer is chairman, American College of Radiology Metrics Committee.
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