A second paper linking chronic fatigue syndrome and murine leukemia virus has been retracted, reports Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch. This paper, 'Detection of MLV-related virus gene sequences in blood of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and healthy blood donors,' was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August 2010 by the US Food and Drug Administration's Shyh-Ching Lo and colleagues. The recent retraction follows on the heels of the retraction of a paper in Science that showed a similar link.
Oransky excerpts the PNAS retraction notice, set to be published on the journal's Web site this week. In it, the authors say that they have a number of concerns about the reproducibility of their work. Though the researchers were able to reproduce their findings, they note that many other labs could not, and that they could not find antibodies in affected people nor isolate the virus nor find viral integration sites.
"It is our current view that the association of murine gamma retroviruses with CFS has not withstood the test of time or of independent verification and that this association is now tenuous," the authors add, according to The New York Times.