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I returned several days ago from a meeting of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Advisory Committee in Washington, D.C., something I swore for years I would NEVER do--not even, I once told someone who urged me to make my voice heard, if the committee set a helicopter down on my lawn to fetch me.

Well, now I've attended one of these two-day conclaves, and not by helicopter but by riding Amtrak to and fro over the bumpy rails that line the Eastern Seaboard. I find that I am still trying to assimilate the event, which certainly was unique from all the meetings that preceded it yet had, I suspect, a lot of familiar elements, too.

Those familiar elements included airport-style security, a panel of seemingly heartless bureaucrats, a Kleenex box discreetly placed on the otherwise Spartan table where members of the public sat to deliver testimony, and a fleet of uniformed Public Health Service employees standing at the ready to escort civilians to the bathroom. The sanctity and safety of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building must be maintained. Nevermind the civilian safety that’s been jeopardized in some part by this committee’s history of listlessness. But more on that in a minute.

Is there another standing committee on Capitol Hill where Kleenex is nearly as essential as microphones for those who testify before it? (more…)

Almost 20 years ago, when I finished my residency, the Infectious Disease fellows placed a message on the telephone saying, “If you are calling about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, call Dr. Bateman at this number,” essentially diverting CFS patients away from the state funded university hospital to my new internal medicine practice.

It was a joke—payback--- for the intense interest I had expressed for CFS during my training, about the time the 1988 Holmes case definition was published. My interest was initially fueled by a personal desire to help my sister, who became ill while I was in medical school, but grew as I searched the medical literature, evaluated hundreds of patients, and came to know the illness face to face.

Nine years ago, after 10 years of CFS, my sister developed non-Hodgkins lymphoma. She died at age 51, overwhelmed by an unknown infection following stem cell transplant. Now WPI has reported the presence of XMRV, a discovery that could potentially have changed her fate. (more…)

I have now received five independent e-mails in the last 36 hours from visitors to this site alerting me to a web site called, "CDC Chatter," apparently a place for CDC employees to make anonymous posts on topics of interest to them. They've sent internal posts they've copied from this site that are critical of Reeves and his CFS program.

It's odd that this CDC site has never been noted on Co-Cure or elsewhere. I was first alerted to this site on Saturday, October 31, the day after J. Mike Miller, Bill Reeves' boss and offically, the Associate Director for Science, National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-borne, and Enteric Diseases at CDC, sat stoically for two working days at the CFSAC meeting. The trim, gray-haired Miller looked directly at those who testified in front of the committee, and spent much of the rest of the meeting staring at the table in front of him, either doodling or taking notes. He remained impassive throughout. He reported that the retroviral program at the agency was "taking the lead" in an effort to replicate the Whittemore Peterson XMRV results. He said the agency was looking at samples from Wichita, Georgia and WPI to confirm the results.

"We're in the process of restructuring programs," he said, adding, "A number of options are being considered."

In response to criticsm from members of the committee about Reeves' recent comments to the press, particularly Reeves' comment that he did not expect the agency to be able to replicate the WPI finding of XMRV in patients, Miller said, "Dr. Reeves is not doing the lab work," to which someone replied, loudly, "Thank God," a comment that was met with wide applause. "Those of us in the research arena know that you really haven't seen anything until you've seen it twice," Miller persisted. The WPI work has been confirmed in three labs already.


Below I've reproduced the first note I was sent about this site, which points out that it's possible for people other than CDC personnel to make posts. He writes: (more…)