{"id":855,"date":"2010-06-18T20:30:09","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T08:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2010\/06\/a_followup_on_bleeding_for_the\/"},"modified":"2010-06-18T20:30:09","modified_gmt":"2010-06-18T08:30:09","slug":"a-followup-on-bleeding-for-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2010\/06\/a-followup-on-bleeding-for-the\/","title":{"rendered":"a follow-up on bleeding for the cause"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of days ago, on my post about <a href=\"https:\/\/sci.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2010\/06\/world-blood-donor-day.shtml\">World Blood Donor day<\/a>, one of my commenters noted that the NZ Blood Service is apparently going to follow their Canadian &amp; Australian counterparts in banning people from giving blood if they&#8217;ve ever had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. (At the moment folks who&#8217;ve had CFS are OK to donate once they&#8217;re fully recovered.) The reason for doing so is <a href=\"http:\/\/eusa-riddled.blogspot.com\/2010\/06\/serious-pants.html\">a purported link between CFS &amp; a particular retrovirus<\/a> (XMRV, or xenotropic murine retrovirus).&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>But the link between CFS &amp; XMRV is not particularly clear-cut. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/cgi\/content\/abstract\/326\/5952\/585\">A study in Nevada<\/a> found that &gt;60% of CFS sufferers (N=101)&nbsp;also had traces of XMRV in their blood, compared to &lt;4% of healthy controls (N=218). (Sorry, the link is to&nbsp;<i>Science<\/i> &amp; may not work for all.) This sounded like something that ERV would be interested in &amp; I was fairly sure she&#8217;d written something on it earlier, so I checked. I was right: she&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/erv\/2009\/10\/xmrv_and_chronic_fatigue_syndr.php\">got a very interesting commentary on the methods<\/a> used by the Nevada researchers. But she&#8217;s aslo cautious about the overall conclusions: fairly obviously XMRV isn&#8217;t the sole agent involved in CFS (if it&#8217;&nbsp;<i>is<\/i> an agent), given that 33% of CFS patients&nbsp;<i>didn&#8217;t <\/i>express it in their blood. It would also be important to know where the samples came from: if the individuals with CFS lived where XMRV infection is common, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virology.ws\/2009\/10\/15\/xmrv-and-chronic-fatigue-syndrome\/\">then this would skew the results<\/a> &amp; make any relationship appear stronger than it is. And It does look as if at least some&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/erv\/2010\/05\/xmrv_and_chronic_fatigue_syndr_13.php\">other labs haven&#8217;t been able to replicate<\/a> these findings.<\/p>\n<p>I can understand the Blood Service wanting to err on the side of caution, given issues with contaminated blood in the past (the <a href=\"http:\/\/nationalhepatitiscinstitute.org\/Data\/Transmission\/New%20Zealand_slow_to_stop_inmate_blood_collection.htm\">Hep C\/haemophilia problem<\/a>, for example).&nbsp;Consequently I have to disagree with Smut on this one &#8211; it probably&nbsp;<i>is<\/i> better to be safe than sorry. A ban can always be reversed if the apparent XMRV-CFS link turns out to be non-existent after all.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, I find it concerning that various commenters, including the lead researcher in the Nevada study, have made statements explicityly linking CFS &amp; XMRV &#8211; when a causal relationship has yet to be demonstrated. (It could equally well be an opportunistic infection.) A commercial test for XMRV is now available. While this is valuable as a research tool (in measuring the incidence of infection, for example), identifying a particular individual as +ve for the virus can&#8217;t at present assist in actually treating the patient. However, in at least some cases people with both CFS and an XMRV infection are taking powerful anti-retroviral drugs (commonly used against AIDS) that can themselves have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virology.ws\/2009\/12\/08\/azt-inhibits-xmrv\/\">significant side effects<\/a>, in the hope that ridding themselves of the virus will also cure the CFS. This seems to be drawing a long bow indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of days ago, on my post about World Blood Donor day, one of my commenters noted that the NZ Blood Service is apparently going to follow their Canadian &amp; Australian counterparts in banning people from giving blood if they&#8217;ve ever had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. (At the moment folks who&#8217;ve had CFS are OK [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6,2],"tags":[3,8,4,31],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>a follow-up on bleeding for the cause : BioBlog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2010\/06\/a-followup-on-bleeding-for-the\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"a follow-up on bleeding for the cause : BioBlog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A couple of days ago, on my post about World Blood Donor day, one of my commenters noted that the NZ Blood Service is apparently going to follow their Canadian &amp; Australian counterparts in banning people from giving blood if they&#8217;ve ever had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. 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