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Neurological, immunologic, and metabolic abnormalities, along with chronic infection with several latent viruses, have been demonstrated repeatedly in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Yet, despite such objective biological abnormalities, the absence of a clear etiologic agent that could explain all these abnormalities has led some observers to conclude that CFS is a psychiatric condition.
Teams from various U.S. medical institutions report that they have identified DNA from a recently discovered human retrovirus, XMRV, in 67% of patients with CFS versus 4% of healthy controls. Many CFS patients, but few healthy controls, had both viral nucleic acid and viral proteins in multiple types of white blood cells, and antibodies to the …