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Very happy to, Trish. As you know, viral particles normally come in spherical shells (called capsids), which break into human cells, then once inside, crack open their shells to release their genetic payload, and these viral genes then start replicating in the cell, in order to construct...

Sure, measuring IgG titers is not the ideal way of detecting enterovirus, as you will find the occasional healthy control with elevated titers, as well as lots of ME/CFS patients with high titers, as the presentation slide below demonstrates (each dot represents either a patient or healthy...

Can you name any area of ME/CFS research which has a better evidence base, and where the basics are more advanced? By the way, those who are skeptical of enterovirus etiologies of ME/CFS: do you know what a non-cytolytic (defective) enterovirus infection is? That's the basis of understanding...

What's more painful are the mistakes such researchers constantly make when looking for enteroviruses. The testing methods they use would not be able to detect enterovirus. So when they get negative results, it does not mean anything, if their methods are "blind" to enterovirus. When Prof Ian...

John Chia finds high enterovirus IgG titers in his ME/CFS patients are routinely decreased when using interferon alpha, ribavirin and oxymatrine treatments, which all fight enterovirus. Moreover, when these treatments are discontinued, titers increase again, along with a relapse in ME/CFS...

If that is the case, why do ME/CFS patients with high titers to coxsackievirus B see a marked reduction in those titers when treated with interferon alpha, or antivirals such as ribavirin (along with a major improvement in symptoms)? If those high titers are unrelated to active infection, why...

Stated incubation periods do vary slightly from one source to the next, presumably because different sources get their data from different studies.

ME/CFS researchers who are not much enamored with the viral theory of ME/CFS, like Dr Robert Naviaux for example, suggest that these high antibody titers found in ME/CFS (and in autism, where high titers to measles virus are found) are not due to an ongoing infection, but are posited to be...

I am not really sure. I guess your question is: if there were an immune weakness appearing in the body, how long would it take for a latent EBV infection to become active again? But I think it would be hard to measure that. In principle incubation periods are straightforward to measure: if you...

Can you link to the article you read which said they were outdated or disproven, I'd like to read it. I've never come across any suggestions that the concept of incubation period is disproven or outdated. You'll find the incubation periods listed in standard medical literature, if you Google...

I was just reading that article on Dr Bhupesh Prusty's HHV-6 research the other day. This preliminary finding of HHV-6 being able to remotely affect the mitochondria in healthy uninfected cells sounds a promising line of investigation.

I've just realized that the response of ME/CFS patients to corticosteroids might be more evidence for a chronic viral infection underlying ME/CFS: It's quite common for ME/CFS patients to feel rapidly and dramatically improved on corticosteroids; in fact one severe bedbound ME/CFS patient on...

Certainly out of the list of pathogens that we know through studies are associated with ME/CFS, it's only enterovirus that fits in the incubation period of 4 to 8 days observed in the outbreaks. The incubation period of coxsackievirus B is usually stated to be 3 to 5 days, and the for echovirus...

If think an ongoing abnormal immune response is also a good hypothesis to explain ME/CFS. There may be low level viral infection in ME/CFS, but it may be that infection combined with an abnormal immune response that creates ME/CFS. So that's another possibility. ME/CFS is a long term...

Erik Johnson proposed a good explanation for why the Lake Tahoe ME/CFS epidemic remained fairly localized: he theorized that the toxic cyanobacteria bloom which was growing all along the beach of the lake at the time of the outbreak was a cofactor that, in combination with the virus, triggered...

Enterovirus is also a good candidate for explaining the ME/CFS outbreaks, because only certain viruses are capable of causing epidemics, and enterovirus is one of those. By contrast HHV-6 and CMV never create outbreaks. They are not the sort of viruses that appear in epidemics. I don't think...

Coincidently, 3 weeks ago I did actually email Ron Davis at his address MECFSResearchQuestions@gmail.com on this very issue (of needing to test the tissues not the blood for viruses). I did not get a reply, but then I expect he is very busy and gets a lot of emails. If anyone knows of a new...

Not unless ME/CFS researchers get to grips with the idea that the infection is in the tissues, not really in the blood. If they keep pumping out studies examining the blood, we are never going to advance. The only reliable blood tests in ME/CFS are antibody tests (by the neutralization method...

Exactly, the ME/CFS enterovirus research pioneered in Britain was not really proven wrong, but simply psychobabbled out of existence. Yes, they ignored the British research in the US. But the reason the significant body of British enterovirus research was discounted over the pond is because US...

Indeed: when I posted a comment containing some links to PACE criticism on one of Mats Reimer's blog articles on a medical site (Dagens Medicin) a couple of years ago, my comment got mysteriously deleted some days later. So I complained to the site's management, who investigated and said they...