Retrovirus XMRV in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Okay, I haven't blogged in almost two years nor replied to almost any e-mails.  Yes, I am still alive.  Here are links to some big news in research on chronic fatigue syndrome.

This could be about as big as the discovery of HIV, in fact, as one of now three known infectious human retroviruses.  However, maybe I'd like to hope to be in the small percentage of patients without this virus since having something else might be better than having a retrovirus that can't be gotten rid of and probably causes cancer as well.  Although other viral causes probably cause cancer as well, but maybe they're better than retroviruses, who knows?

I think chronic fatigue syndrome has rarely been covered by journals of the caliber of Science and Nature.

Science Research Journals/Sites

Detection of an Infectious Retrovirus, XMRV, in Blood Cells of Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1179052
(full article is accessible from university domain)

Virus linked to chronic fatigue syndrome
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091008/full/news.2009.983.html

Consortium of Researchers Discover Retroviral Link to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/oct2009/nci-08.htm

Popular Science Magazines

Retrovirus Linked to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Could Aid in Diagnosis
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chronic-fatigue-syndrome-retrovirus

Major News Media

Virus Is Found in Many With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/health/research/09virus.html

Cancer-Causing Virus Linked to Chronic Fatigue
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125501227713473525.html
(subscription article is accessible if you search and go through Google News)

Virus discovery called breakthrough in fight against chronic fatigue syndrome
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-fatigue9-2009oct09,0,3368993.story

Study isolates virus in chronic fatigue sufferers
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN08539703

Virus Linked To Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113613955

Revolutionary

For some reason, one thing from my SFGate millenium horoscope stuck out to me when I read it in the past, and I wondered what sort of thing I could possibly make up in my mind to fit it.

Pluto's entrance into your sign in 2008 will be a trip in more ways than one. Remember this is the planet of transformation. About this same time, Jupiter - Mr. Big himself - enters your sign. It's like the Universe hands you an atomic weapon to use for good or ill.

Like I could have any effect that big....

I think I see one now, and it can indeed be used for something good or ill (hah, literally) on that large of a scale. Amazing yet frightening at the same time.

Yep, so all of my ten or so blog readers may think I'm crazy...

Hijab and Henna Hands

I was miffed that I couldn't find a photograph from a Web page that I had come across a while ago, using many variants of words I remembered from the page in Google search. I left a tab with a search open in my browser, and after a few weeks looked at the tab again today. I'm not sure if the page reloaded the search or something, but it seems like a new first result appeared since when I left it, and it was related to what I was looking for. I guess the Google crawl had updated since the last search. Go Google.

I'm not sure why I wanted to find the photograph. It's pretty random. It's a picture from Time magazine's What the World Eats, Part III, of a woman in full hijab with henna decorations on her hands. I thought, neat, the women will still find a way to adorn the only visible body part. Though I read from the related page that the henna decorations were for a wedding she was attending.

So I've now given up my privacy and turned on Google Web history for both search and browsing.

Whoa

Single-handedly finding a cure for cancer, spurring a hydrogen economy, and desalinating water all from the same technology?

Patient's vision: Treating cancer without chemo

Even though the article is written in sort of a fable-like way and the results are very preliminary, I haven't had such a whoa moment since the first days of Google-searching, and that was pretty wowing.

Big Pus Ball Theory of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

I'm figuring out that the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia are caused by the body being turned into something like a huge pus ball. Okay, maybe not pus but lymph or something, but that just sounded amusing. Or painful. Because yeah, that's where the fibromyalgia pain seems to be coming from- massive ballooning of fluid all over the body, backing up every part of the circulatory system, stretching and ripping things.

A big pus ball kind of fits into the picture of the yet to be completed Stanford study suggesting that the body is being overrun by viruses. There are two seemingly random things I came across CFS researchers observing and finding strange, so I made a mental note- one that CFS patients consistently had reduced range of motion across the body, and the other that pain and stiffness tended to be located in the left shoulder and chest area. I have to go back and find these references, but they all fit into the puzzle pretty amazingly. A limp balloon is very flexible but a blown up balloon is not.

The big pus ball has been draining ever so incrementally since January. More recently, there's been very clear draining sensations from the brain, in the head, in the sinuses, down the neck, as well as surges of fluid which sometimes hurt and make me hope that nothing pops, rips, or gets stuck in my brain. Sometimes they're followed immediately by perceived changes in brain function, mood, and temperament. And yeah, I'm feeling a bit better, as shown by the slew of blog posts in the last week. My head is deflating. No wonder there are cognitive and psychiatric symptoms associated with the illness.

The PCP has checked in with a message for an update, though I haven't yet replied. Not sure if he has a point since he doesn't offer anything except maybe to see if I've decided to admit that it's time to look into anxiety. After he spoke with the Stanford doctor, he's had less wiggle room and so just doesn't say anything, but doesn't actually admit that I have chronic fatigue syndrome. If I tried to ask for treatment that simply falls into the guidelines for treatment of CFS established by the medical authorities, it would be like pulling teeth. So I get the feeling that he still can't think of anything but anxiety.

I'm actually very surprised that CFS researchers have managed to get the medical authorities to publish guidelines for diagnosis and treatment. Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to find a practicing doctor who actually accepts and uses the guidelines, especially ones that are not considered to be quacks. Interestingly, the quacks actually for the most part follow the standard treatment guidelines, aside from their untested theories on microbial treatment. I've gone through the list of recommended doctors from a large CFS organization and not a single one of them was to be found in my insurance network directory which is probably one of the largest in the country. Google-searching shows that most of them would also be considered quacks by the rest. While perusing Web forums and blogs and asking people who their doctors are, it incredibly seems to come down to about one dozen doctors across the entire country, who both treat CFS and have some respectability in the medical profession. People wait years on waiting lists and travel out of state to get treatment.

I'm wondering if I described how the color of my blood has changed from rusty orange brown, to brownish purple, to creamy dark purple, and then a more normal red though still strangely creamy, correlated with improvement in symptoms, if the PCP and everyone else who thinks CFS is anxiety and stress can still be stuck on that. Does anxiety cause rusty orange blood and ballooning of the body in the absence of perceived anxiety? Maybe. But really?

"Computational Thinker" Thinks About Medicine

Some of the herpes viruses that are being studied at Stanford as suspects in chronic fatigue syndrome are described as remaining dormant in the body after a person recovers from infection, in specific parts of nerve cells or bone marrow, though sometimes reactivating. (The better-known members of the herpes family include the viruses that cause chicken pox and mono, in addition to the ones people actually call "herpes".) People are familiar with shingles being a reactivation of the dormant chicken pox virus.

I read about "dormant" viruses and wonder what does "dormant" actually mean to doctors and scientists? Is it completely asleep and immobile, nonfunctioning and nonreproducing, not doing anything to the human body? Is it the exact same virus entities from say fifty years ago in somebody's body reawakening after fifty years, and none of them woke up during that time in between? If not, that would mean they reproduced somewhere along the way.

What happens to all of the microbes when a body fights off infections? What happens when you take an antibiotic? Is the reason why people usually stay well after recovering from infections because antibiotics or the immune system kill every single one of the bacteria possibly located in the body? What would a random doctor or medical scientist answer to these questions?

Me thinking, thinks that well, these are cells and molecules, antibodies and antigens, flowing through blood and lymph and whatever in the body. They are actually objects and not magic nor abstract ideas. Physics, chemistry, and statistics apply. What are the chances that antibodies and antigens will perfectly collide such that every single one of the infecting microbe is killed before it gets to reproduce? Why do low levels of antibodies remain after an infection has been fought off?

My imagination plus logic thinks that viruses and other microbes in the body probably behave like chemical reactions with equilibriums that shift in response to various factors in the environment. Are "dormant" viruses actually "dormant," or are they just in an equilibrium in very small numbers against the immune system? I'm picturing visible infection as analogous to those pH experiments everyone does in high school chemistry where you drip one drop of acid or base at a time into a beaker of some pH-detecting liquid that changes color suddenly from clear to pink after one particular drop.


Viruses are known to be linked to some types of cancer, but interestingly there hasn't been much attention on the viruses as active causes of the disease and targets for treatment. Sometimes I think this is an example of lack of thought.

Here's an interesting article on a new discovery:

Kill the Virus, Stop the Cancer

And here's the research paper from the cool open access PLoS journals:

Treating Cancer as an Infectious Disease—Viral Antigens as Novel Targets for Treatment and Potential Prevention of Tumors of Viral Etiology


There have been a lot of news articles on the following big study which includes the conclusion that eating more meat increases the risk of cancer.

Doctors, Dietitians Stand Behind Fat/Cancer Link: Most Physicians Applaud New Report; Meat Groups Oppose Recommendations

In the meat and vegetables area, it's not enough to just eat more vegetables, you have to eat less meat too. That's one possible factor to explain different results from different studies, such as one I recently read about finding that doubling fruit and vegetable intake did not have an effect, and another finding that a diet heavy in vegetable-y foods lowered risk compared to a diet heavy in meaty foods. Seemingly conflicting research study results actually have logical explanations that should be figured out, and which probably actually turn out to be key information.


Okay, it's a vague link, but I thought this article on the need to teach and apply computational thinking in sciences and life in general is interesting. "Computational thinking" seems to be a term describing basic logic and problem solving skills, useful and needed for just about everything, but not taught or practiced very much outside of computer science and engineering.

Computational Thinking, Jeannette Wing
Official Google Blog: About the Google Education Summit

Tea and Tulips

A while ago, I saw this article on $13,000 Puer Tea and certain tea prices multiplying seven times over three years in China. (Apparently, you can see the full article without subscribing if you click the same link from Google News.) Then I came across this stock chart, NASDAQ:JRJC. I've never seen such a nice reverse L-shaped stock price graph. I also read that there's a shortage of domestic help because so many maids are day-trading stocks instead. The China Finance Online stock, I would consider to be a double bubble, because it probably makes money off of bubbles and the number of people day-trading stocks.

Asia's wealthiest businessman, Li Ka-Shing, has warned of a Chinese stock bubble. But this bubble has the potential to fuel itself for quite some time, just by the number of new people entering stock trading and the law of supply and demand on prices. This has the potential to be very bad, the longer it's drawn out.

China Equities Boast World-Beating Market Caps

This market capitalization inflation is “a good illustration of just how far Chinese stocks have run up.” He calculated that the 12-month forward P/E for the MSCI China index has reached 23.1, compared to a 10-year average of 13.0.

A euphoria matching the scale of China’s is taking place in India, where stocks are trading at 21.5 times earnings, versus a 10-year average of 13.3 times.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street has nice little summaries of major economic bubbles in history, including the great tulip mania. Puer tea seems just slightly more valuable than tulips since you can drink it.

This book is all about how you can't beat the market. I would agree that most people cannot time the market or beat the market. But the world's richest businessmen beat the market all the time. They know when to get in and when to get out. That's how they got so rich. Listen to the rich people.