Perhaps Hip or others would be able to outline the differences between the interferon which Dr Kerr is proposing with that used by Dr Chia. And is this treatment likely to be viable?
Interferon treatment does seem to work pretty very well for enterovirus-associated ME/CFS, often moving patients up at least two levels on the ME/CFS scale
very severe, severe, moderate, mild, remission. There have been three studies to date on interferon treatment, which are detailed in this
MEpedia article.
However, unfortunately patients tend to relapse back into ME/CFS typically 4 or 5 months after the course of interferon (although some lasted for over a year before they relapsed). And there are reasons why you cannot use repeated courses of interferon to keep ME/CFS at bay.
One reason being that patients typically develop antibodies against recombinant interferon with long-term treatment, and those antibodies disable the interferon, making this drug ineffective. And of course there is the high cost and the substantial depression it causes in many patients, so it is a hard drug to tolerate.
It would be wonderful if the huge improvements many patients get on interferon would last, but sadly they don't, and patients usually relapse.
It's most likely that the relapse occurs because although interferon greatly reduces viral loads, it is not able to fully eliminate the virus, and there are still pockets of virus left, so the viral infection will eventually grow back.
It's interesting that relapse in these interferon-treated patients would often occur after a bout of heavy exertion, which only underlines the deleterious effects of exercise in ME/CFS — and in enterovirus infection in general (it is has long been known that in enterovirus myocarditis, exercise is pretty detrimental).
John Chia says that he rarely uses interferon now, simply because patients find it very hard to tolerate, and because it is not a long term cure.
But although interferon is not a long-term solution, its efficacy does provide supporting evidence for the role of enteroviral infection in ME/CFS.
Dr Chia found the improvements produced by a course of interferon beta do not last either, and patients return to their illness baseline 6 months after the course of interferon beta. So again it works, but the improvements do not last.
EDIT Mar 2019: Latest news I heard is that Dr Chia now uses interferon beta to treat ME/CFS patients in certain circumstances: he uses interferon beta for severe hospitalized bedbound ME/CFS patients, and finds that after two weeks, these patients are able to get out of bed a take walks around the hospital.
