XMRVCENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION
Just before 2012 dawned, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences retracted a 2010 paper claiming that chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is related to a murine virus. Seven coauthors, among them researchers from the US Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, signed the retraction, which stated that while the blood samples they collected from CFS patients were not contaminated, they had failed to support the initial findings with follow-up studies. The move came after Science retracted the first paper—published in 2009—to posit a link between the syndrome and a mouse virus.
The retraction deals another significant blow to the hypothesis that the mysterious syndrome is related in some way to murine viruses. The PNAS paper was the only published account to ...
