Prostate cancer myth busted: No XMRV virus found in patients

Monday, October 19, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: XMRV, health news, Natural News

(NaturalNews) Everywhere you turn these days, drug companies are attempting to associate diseases with viruses as a preamble for a future vaccine push. For the last few years, Pharma-friendly researchers have been claiming prostate cancer might be caused by Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus (XMLV) because they've discovered such viruses in prostate cancer tumors.

Similarly, there was a recent push to claim that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome was caused by a virus for the same reason: CFS sufferers seem to have higher counts of the virus than healthy people. But as recently published in a NaturalNews article (https://www.naturalnews.com/027248_disease_ca...), it makes more sense that this viral count is a side effect of CFS than a root cause. (Unless, of course, a strange virus was introduced via a vaccine, which is one vector through which such a condition could have been forced onto victims.)

No link between XMRV and prostate cancer

Now, new research published in the journal Retrovirology which looked at the presence of the virus in 589 prostate cancer patients reveals that there is no link between XMRV and prostate cancer. Out of the 589 prostate cancer patients studied, DNA or RNA fragments of XMRV viruses were found in exactly zero patients.

None of the patients even had antibodies for XMRV.

This research reveals quite conclusively that XMRV is not "the" cause of prostate cancer. Obviously, prostate cancer can exist entirely without the presence of XMRV. This doesn't mean, of course, that XMRV doesn't contribute to cancer in some way in those patients where it shows a presence, but it does prove that XMRV is not a requirement for prostate cancer.

As with CFS, the more likely explanation here seems to be that XMRV is only found in prostate cancer patients because cancer is a disease that grows out of control in a suppressed immune system environment. The same immune system that fails to keep cancer in check is also likely to be a poor defender against invading viruses.

As a metaphor, consider this: Paramedics see blood at most traffic accidents. But do they leap to the conclusion that traffic accidents are caused by blood? Of course not. That would be silly.

The presence of blood is simply an unfortunate side effect of the root cause (someone driving on medications, perhaps). So why do prostate cancer researchers leap to the conclusion that the mere presence of a virus in cancer tumors describes a causal relationship between the two? It's an unscientific leap of logic that simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny. And this new German study provides yet more evidence calling into question any such link between XMRV and prostate cancer.

Sources for this story include:

Retrovirology

Oliver Hohn, Hans Krause, Pia Barbarotto, Lars Niederstadt, Nadine Beimforde, Joachim Denner, Kurt Miller, Reinhard Kurth and Norbert Bannert. Lack of evidence for xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) in German prostate cancer patients. Retrovirology, 2009

http://www.retrovirology.com