On the uncharacteristically cool morning of July 22, 2009, 24 scientists gathered at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The topic: a troubling new retrovirus called XMRV. A paper in the journal Science was about to implicate the virus as the cause of a devastating disease with a dismissive name: chronic fatigue syndrome, or CFS. Doctors have compared the worst cases of CFS to end-stage AIDS. CFS patients have cancer rates that are significantly elevated and immune systems that are seriously impaired. The disease can confer a kind of early dementia and may shorten its victims’ lives by 20 years.
Scientific explanations for the rise of CFS cases, a phenomenon dating to the mid-1980s, have mostly focused on viruses, but psychiatric theories have abounded, too, driven primarily by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which promoted the idea that CFS was “hysteria” or hypochondria. Many scientists and ...
