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Kabul blast
Maoists in Maharashtra |
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Secondary education
Counterfeit currency
A question of legacy
Mental health care
No peace in Swat valley
Health
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Kabul blast
Casualties
in Thursday’s suicide car bomb blast outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul could have been as high as those in a similar explosion there in July last year (60) but for a reinforced perimeter wall erected recently. The intensity of the blast and the mode of its execution make it clear that the heinous crime, in which at least 17 Afghans were killed, was committed by the same group which was behind last year’s outrage. American intelligence officials had found that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies had helped to plan last year’s attack. The way Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid quickly issued a statement owning responsibility for the suicide bombing this time was a clear giveaway that he was trying to keep the ISI out of scrutiny. But the smokescreen does not fool anybody. A senior Kabul police official said as much: “I can announce clearly that the phenomenon that is causing us trouble is being organised from the other side of the border.” This was the fifth suicide strike in Kabul in two months. The road on which the car bomb exploded also houses the Afghan Interior Ministry and some government departments. The Indian embassy was clearly the target. That the terrorists could succeed in causing mayhem in such a high-security area is a reflection on the American security apparatus as well. Perhaps the Taliban are emboldened by arguments of some US administration officials that they (Taliban) do not pose a threat to the US. What they refuse to acknowledge is that a Taliban takeover in Kabul can help Al-Qaida launch more attacks. This time it was an Indian establishment; the next time it may be an American one. Under the circumstances, India will have to strengthen its defences even more. Its engineers, doctors and other workers are engaged in humanitarian and reconstruction work in Afghanistan. That has earned India a lot of goodwill, and Pakistan has been uneasy over this development. If the US does not help end Islamabad’s perfidy, it will only be compromising its own war on terror. It must not let the attack influence the debate in the US on what strategy to pursue in Afghanistan.
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Maoists in Maharashtra
The
regularity with which Maoists have been ambushing police patrols in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra reflects the utter failure of anti-Naxalite operations in the area. Friday’s ambush, which left 17 policemen dead, was the third such strike in the district this year. As many as 15 policemen were killed in one of the encounters in February and 16 more, including five women constables, lost their lives in May. The district, bordering Abujhmath area of Chattisgarh, has been a Maoist stronghold for several decades and Maoist ideologue Kobad Ghandy, who was arrested in Delhi last month, is said to have been active in the area. The ambush on Friday also coincided with Maoists beheading a suspected police informer and setting a panchayat bhavan on fire in the same district. The renewed burst of Maoist attacks appear designed to mock the Union Home Minister’s offer for talks-before-annihilation and claims by Maharashtra police that Maoists would not be able to enforce their poll-boycott call in the district. It is also possible that Maoists are flexing their muscle to mount pressure on the government to ensure that their arrested leaders are treated well in custody, even if they are not released. Coming barely five days before the Maharashtra Assembly election, the ambush is bound to cast its shadow on polling in the three Assembly constituencies in the district. The Maoists’ poll-boycott call has already had an impact on campaigning. Political parties and candidates, who in any case had abandoned the area since long, have refrained from venturing into remote areas despite considerable security provided to them. An apprehensive administration has already requisitioned 7,000 additional policemen and two helicopters for transporting polling personnel. And while polling in the district will end at 3 pm, two hours before it does in the rest of the state, it is already clear that if it takes place at all, it will be rather low in Gadchiroli. Politicians and policemen have been busy looking for alibis though. Maoists, they claim, are more in number than policemen. The rebels were armed with sophisticated arms, they have added, and there were several Nepali-looking men among them. They also claim to have killed 15 Maoists though not a single body of a slain rebel has been recovered. None of this is really convincing because Gadchiroli has been a hot-bed of Maoist activities since long and Maharashtra police raised an elite commando force to deal with the outlaws. The strategy certainly needs to be revised as none of the steps appears to have stamped the authority of the state in the district. Maoists simply cannot be allowed to hijack democracy.
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Secondary education
Just
when the HRD Ministry was patting itself on the back for giving education the much-needed impetus, here comes a dampener. A World Bank report has described India as an “under-performer” in secondary education. The gross enrolment rate of India at the secondary level lags behind East Asia and Latin America. Even nations with lower per capita incomes like Vietnam and Bangladesh fare better. Clearly, when it comes to what the World Bank has called a “forgotten middle”, India needs to brace up and universalise access as well as improve the quality of secondary education. The right emphasis on primary education is evident from India’s spending on it, the recent passing of Right to Education Act and the thrust given to Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Yet, it is secondary education alone that equips young people for both the job market and higher education. Secondary education is thus the crucial link that can play a major role in helping youth break the poverty barrier. However, as things are secondary education in India is marked by inequities. While the state wise disparities are glaring — with both Punjab and Haryana doing poorly — there is unequal enrolment between urban and rural areas and a gnawing gender gap too. Secondary education is marred by uneven distribution of school infrastructure and lack of trained teachers and 27 per cent of India’s districts have less than one secondary school for every 1,000 youth, aged 15 to 19 years. Nearly one- third of villages lack schools within the prescribed radius. India must pay heed to the words of Sam Carlson, Lead Education Specialist, World Bank and rise up to three-pronged challenge of equity, access and quality. The Centre’s newly launched Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyaan to address both the issue of access and quality is a step in the right direction. The RSMA aims to provide good quality education to all young people in the age group 14-18 years by 2020. Clearly, there is an urgent need to look beyond numbers and focus on quality as well. To capitalise on its demographic advantage, India has to ensure its youth is employable, educated and skilled.
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Truth without humility would be an arrogant caricature — Mahatma Gandhi
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Counterfeit currency Virtually every human action is the product of a mens rea (intention) and cause. Hence it is important that one takes note thereof if a person, under the impression of his being the sole representative of his country, acts hostile against India with an additional impetus emanating from his religion and god. Understandably, one’s focus is on fake Indian currency note (FICN) and the source of origin thereof, Pakistan. Though FICN could have several printing press, multiple entry points, myriad distribution centres, cunning circulation managers, dynamic marketing executives, professional carriers, naive, needy and greedy Indian consumers eager to make quick buck, and the battery of ISI mastermind, management gurus and its agents, let us face the reality. FICN has caught the imagination of a section of Indians who are being ruthlessly exploited by (some are conniving and colluding with) India’s congenital hostile neighbour, dialogue or no dialogue. Indeed Pakistan could never have had found such a vast and readymade market to tap and an opportunity to trip a rising Indian economy on its doorstep. The Pakistani game plan starts with the western sector of India with the rail gateway of Munabao (in south-western Rajasthan) through which passes the weekly Thar express. Further north is the road and railhead at Wagah/Attari through which pass the Samjhauta Express, Lahore-Delhi bus service and the Indo-Pak freight service. Up north is the third point Chakan da Bagh in Kashmir which is the entry/exit gate for commodity trade between the two Kashmirs of India and Pakistan where law is slightly more liberal in lack of its application and less harsh for its gross violation. In this background, a cardinal principle followed by the Pakistani guards, Rangers, intelligence and operational outfits is to ensure smooth penetration of the international border by the Pakistanis or any willing, hostile foreign mercenary. The unwritten code is a tacit understanding between the guards and goondas. “We will help you in every possible way to cross over to Hindustan to create chaos, confusion and hell; but in case you are caught, we will not come to your rescue and if shot we will not claim you. You are welcome to take the risk and reap the benefit of our collective enterprise.” One is constrained to recall the identical Pakistani mischief and modus operandi being resorted to during the Soviet-Afghan war of 1980s which have been vividly described by Shuza Nawaz in his book Crossed Swords: “the Afghan bureau of the ISI was selecting ‘volunteers’, often Pashtuns from the regular Pakistani army who were fluent in Pashto and Dari and were infiltrated into Afghanistan to guide the Mujahideens...Such soldiers were under strict instruction not to reveal their identity. If captured, Pakistan would deny that they were from the Pakistani army.” ISI traditionally got the cue and command from its army chief-President Zia-ul-Haq. Thus the bleeding USSR’s forces in Kabul upset the Soviet leader Gorbachev so much that at the meeting of the secretaries of the central committee of the Soviet communist party on March 15, 1985, he spoke about his meetings with various foreign leaders who had earlier come to Moscow: “President Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan is one cunning politician. He constantly wanted to assure us of his friendly feelings, his good neighbourliness, and that he himself was a victim of a situation where there were about three million so-called Afghan refugees in Pakistan. In general, it was pure demagoguery with the perversion of fact. I told Zia-ul-Haq directly...you are a military man yourself and understand very well that we know in the most precise way what is going on in Pakistan right now, where and what kind of camps are functioning that train the dushman (‘enemy’ in Farsi, and used by Soviets to refer to the Mujahideens), who is arming the bandits, and who is supplying them with money and all other necessities. Thus, overall, we put quite serious pressure on Zia-ul-Haq, and he left the room clearly unhappy”. The tradition of mischief and roguery continue as “operations” begin by the organising country “targeting” India. As for the “channel couriers”, they need to be identified and suitably briefed. Thus the ISI agents get the full list of the Indian passengers coming to Pakistan, and those of travelling from Pakistan to India, in advance. Thereafter a careful categorisation and classification are done to identify, track, catch (and if need be train) the carriers of FICN to India. Essentially, the target couriers are divided into Pakistani and Indian. The former is chosen with great care as he needs to complete the mission unharmed and undetected. However, there could be some minority Hindu Pakistanis too who would be “allowed to get caught” to make a double-edged political and diplomatic manoeuvre without much effort. Thus when an old Pakistani Hindu couple get caught with FICN on entering India by land route, it transpired that the ISI operators handed over FICN/took away Pakistani currency at 10:4 ratio, which translates into Rs 1 lakh FICN and Pakistani Rs 40,000. Thus the Pakistani army/ISI duo succeeded in eliminating a property owning, wealthy minority couple from its soil, replenished their coffer with genuine Pakistani currency 40,000 and gave away Rs 1 lakh FICN for purchasing landed property along the Indian side of the Indo/Pak border at a price higher than the existing Indian market price through a currency which has neither any value nor any use. Yet, if caught, both the men and the money will ultimately hit the Indian economy. Indeed, if undetected over a longer period, the continuous land grabbing by the Pakistanis, of the Indian soil, during the course of time can turn it into an extension of Pakistan deep into the Rajasthan districts of Barmer and Jaisalmer. As regards the Muslim carriers, the safest are the poor and illiterate women who, even if caught, will be of no use to India’s law enforcement agencies. They will surely go to jail for carrying FICN from Pakistan to India, but they can neither throw any light about the origin or the supplier thereof in Pakistan nor can they say anything about FICN’s “distributor, consumer or beneficiary” in India. Hence the helpless women lose the money as well as liberty as they proceed to prison for an indefinite period without trial. Amongst the non-Muslim conduits, a section of Sikhs who visit the shrines in Pakistan is under the Pakistani radar owing to a mixture of ignorance, opportunity and greed of a few under the garb of religious trip across the border. Here too some unwise Indians have got into the lucrative, yet avoidable, act born out of an urge for quick buck. The pattern of operations vis-a-vis Muslim and non-Muslim carriers and conduits between the suppliers and end-users is somewhat similar and can rarely be differentiated by the common people. The FICN is now a low-risk, high-profit business like drugs and the flourishing white collar crimes resorted to by some Indian experts. However, one important difference is that the people caught in FICN travelogue virtually go to jail without trial and are likely to continue to rot there. Perhaps rightly! For, in case FICN outstrips the circulation of legal tender in the currency market, the entire edifice of Indian economy will come down with a thud. Suspicion will lead to refusal of acceptance of currency. Discovery of FICN at the conclusion of a contract will lead to court battle and possible bankruptcy. There could be myriad imponderable scenario and all are potentially disastrous. All Pakistanis arriving in India must be checked thoroughly, the way the US does it to foreigners (especially those from suspected and risky countries) at airports and ports. Everyone, legal or illegal, arriving from neighbouring countries too need to be checked along with their cargo, baggage (accompanied and unaccompanied). All sensitive entry/exit points need to be strengthened. Profiling of passengers too will be necessary to combat an economic disaster. Unfortunately, India’s progress is bound to catch the devil’s imagination for an evil design. Hence, India has no way but to act
tough.
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A question of legacy WHILE Oslo is the throbbing fiscal heartbeat of Scandinavia, it is also culture. It is at once Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Munch, the Vikings and the scintillating philharmonic music. Today, however, Oslo is perhaps best known for being the home of the Nobel Peace Prize. One of the highlights of my year thus far has been a visit to the Nobel Peace Center, which is a marvel of technology and a testament to the enduring and original legacy of Alfred Nobel. In his lifetime, Alfred Nobel was best known for inventing explosives, most notably, dynamite. When his brother, Ludvig Nobel died in France in 1888, French newspapers mistakenly reported the death of Alfred Nobel instead of his brother. One obituary stated, “Le marchand de la mort est mort” – The merchant of death is dead. The newspaper further commented, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” Nobel was shaken by the erroneous obituary. He did not want to be remembered as an exterminator. It was then that he decided that his legacy would be the Nobel Prizes to honour intellectual efforts in the service of humanity. And what a legacy it has been. The Nobel Peace Prize in particular has been Nobel’s way of compensating for his invention of explosive devices. Over the years, the Nobel Peace Prize has come to embody tremendous social prestige and is the most controversial of all Nobel Prizes. At the Nobel Peace Center, I was dazzled by the Nobel Field which introduces all the Peace Laureates and their trail-blazing work via 96 movement-controlled screens against the backdrop of atmospheric music. I was overwhelmed to learn about the laureates, all of whom chose to break away and seek a different path. The Nobel laureates come from widely diverse backgrounds because the very concept of peace has continued to evolve since the time of Alfred Nobel. It was very interesting for me to note that the laureates include heads of state as well as revolutionaries, pacifists as well as military generals, thinkers as well as pragmatic men of action from all over the world. While the sub-continent claims its laureates in the 14th Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi and Muhammad Yunus, the absence of Gandhi, the international icon of peace is enormous. Gandhi was nominated for the Peace Prize in1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and also prior to his assassination in 1948. The Nobel Peace Prize committee has chosen never to comment on speculations as to why Gandhi was not awarded the prize. While the legacy of Alfred Nobel and the Noble laureates shines with remarkable glimmer across the world’s only digital wall paper at the Nobel Peace Center and inspires numerous people on a regular basis, it also impounds everyone with the all-intrusive question: What will YOUR legacy be? It is time perhaps for reflection and
introspection.
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Mental health care
The PGI, Chandigarh, was one of the two centres that took up the integration of mental health with general health services in 1975. While working in the outpatient department of the PGI, we were struck by the high dropout rate of patients who took consultation and its relationship to the distance the patients had to travel to come to the clinic and the chronicity of the illness. We recognised that the main way we can address delays in seeking treatment was to take services to the doorstep of patients. In the late 1970s public health interventions were still the predominant service model. The medium we chose both in Chandigarh and Bangalore was to integrate mental health with general health services. This was done by identifying four priority conditions and giving focussed training to general health workers and doctors. These initial experiences from Raipur Rani, Haryana, and Sakalawara, near Bangalore, were so positive that it was taken up for further extension by the ICMR and eventually in 1982 the National Mental Health Programme was formulated. The district mental health programme (DMHP), which should have been the foundation of mental health care, has been a relative failure in its implementation. Though the programme has been extended to 125 districts, the implementation has ignored the original goal of taking services to the people. The most important failure is the low involvement of health workers and doctors in care. Instead, in almost all of the centres the programme has become’ extension clinics’ where psychiatric teams visit once a month or so and conduct clinics. Unfortunately, even after 10 years of the expanded DMHP all that we have is a total number of patient contacts. Crucial information about the duration of illness at contact, the number completing treatment, the response to treatment, the need for referral support is not available. Even in the recently concluded evaluation, the measures were indirect ones like the attitude of the population and not clinical care. India has a rich and proud tradition of family movement in mental health care. Starting with Dr Vidya Sagar of Amritsar and the mental health centre, Vellore, families have been included as partners in care. A number of family groups like Amend in Bangalore, Asha in Chennai and Roshni in Delhi have taken the family empowerment and advocacy to high levels of activism. However, again financial support has not come from the government. If we have to preserve, protect and support one Indian approach to mental health care, it has to be the family support to mentally ill persons. We have to develop specific supports (financial, professional, emergency) to families without delay. The growth of the private sector has happened mostly in the last one decade. There have been todate no specific mechanisms to involve and integrate private-public health sectors in the mental health programmes. Given the limited state infrastructure and the spread of the private sector in the country, there is no way mental health programmes can make progress without the active involvement of the private sector. There are major changes in the attitudes of a community. As practising psychiatrists, we see a widening of mental health issues that come to us for professional help and mental health is discussed and debated on the radio, TV, newspapers and periodicals. The challenge is to meet the heightened expectations of the population. We always felt ashamed of the extremely inhuman conditions in which the mentally ill were treated in mental hospitals and of scandals like in Shahdra hospital, Ranchi hospital, Pune hospital or that of the Trivandrum hospital during the 1980s. During the last 10 years, thanks to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), there have been changes in the functioning of these institutions. However, the areas that have not received necessary attention are (i) UG medical education in psychiatry is grossly inadequate; (ii) DMHP needs a rethink; (iii) there is gross unevenness across states; (iv) monitoring and evaluation has not been part of the programmes, and (v) structures for the mental health programmes to function well have not been put into place. The DMHP has to be given the central place in the planning of the mental health programme. Taking services close to people’s houses has the greatest potential to provide care to the ill population. The current “extension clinic” approach has to be replaced with true integration of mental health care with primary health care personnel (similar to that of TB, leprosy etc). There is an urgent need to develop specific indicators to monitor the DMHP. Similar is the need to enhance technical inputs to organise the programme — the training of PHC personnel, essential medicines, support and supervision of health personnel by private sector mental health professionals, administrative support needed to monitor and periodically evaluate the programme and public mental health education. There should be technical advisory committees at the national and state levels to guide the DMHP on a continuous manner. There has to better public-private partnership. Private sector involvement can range from their support to train the personnel, monitor the work locally, take up specific care programmes like the maintenance care of chronic patients, sharing of information of their clinical work so that the state/country statistics reflect the total country and not only that of the public sector. A serious dialogue and identification of funded activities should occur in the coming years. Support for NGO initiatives, especially in the areas of (i) setting up of self-help groups of patients/families;(ii) undertake public mental health education to reduce stigma; (iii) providing financial and technical support for setting up a spectrum of rehabilitation facilities such as day care, half-way and long stay homes, sheltered workshops, income generating activities by patients and families. Increasing public awareness about the commonness of mental disorders, understandability of mental disorders as illnesses, treatability, the importance of acceptance by the family and the community and rehabilitation. India has a tradition of giving importance to mental health in the Hindu philosophy. Yoga, meditation, spiritual ways of understanding adverse life situations are part of the day-to-day life of Indians. There is need to disseminate new knowledge, strengthen helpful practices so that persons in need feel free to take help. In conclusion, the story of mental health care is an unfinished one. There has been much that has occurred during the last three decades. However, there is much more to be done to complete the
story. Prof. Wig is Emeritus Professor of Psyschiatry, PGIMER, Chandigarh, and Prof Srinivasa Murthy is a retired Professor of Psyschiatry, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosis, Bangalore
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No peace in Swat valley The
drawing shows three boys in traditional Pakistani long shirts, shalwar kameez, crying and holding banners that read “We want peace,” “Not the peaces (sic) of human bodies” and, in Arabic script, “Aman” — Pashto for “peace.” On the left of the group, two hooded men (members of the Taliban, one presumes) carry swords; on the right, two figures in uniform carry guns (Pakistani army, one guesses). In the foreground, a hooded figure holds down a person who is pleading, “Please let me go; I have small children.” This was a drawing by a schoolgirl named Sheema for an end-of-Ramadan competition in Mingora, the main town of Pakistan’s Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier province. The scene depicting her hometown this spring — civilians caught between the militants and the army — illustrates the huge human cost of the operation by the Pakistan army against the Taliban. And the suffering is far from over. After a week of talking to people living in the Swat Valley, displaced from Swat or working in Swat, I can attest that Sheema got it exactly right. The tragedy of more than 2 million people being displaced in less than two months may have vanished from the headlines, but the civilian drama continues. If there is less attention to their needs, it’s partly because it’s still hard for anyone other than the armed forces or a native Swati to reach most of the district north of Mingora. The army can take foreign journalists on periodic tours of the “cleared” areas in the south but rarely in the north, where the situation remains uncertain. One thing is obvious: Beyond Mingora, the Swat Valley is still an insecure place. The Pakistanis themselves have concerns for the collateral damage that the offensive has caused: A visit by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan resulted in a strongly worded report about mass graves and extrajudicial “revenge” killings. And last week, the Pakistani daily Dawn and others reported that a 10-minute video apparently showing Pakistani soldiers beating men detained in anti-militant operations had surfaced on the Internet. The army is investigating. If the restrictions caused by emergency army administration — such as curfews and checkpoints — are a nuisance and add risks for civilians, anger against the militants is rising, too. The displaced return to areas promised to be “cleared” of militants, only to find it might not be so. People fear that if they are seen during daytime (from the hills where the militants tend to hide) having contact with any army or government personnel, the Taliban will come down at night to exact a heavy price on them. Close to Peshawar, in Mardan, I met with some of the displaced people who have found temporary shelter there — they number more than 1,000. Fourteen of the families are redisplaced — i.e. they tried to return home and found it impossible to live there. What 35-year-old Selma mentions is typical: Before the army’s action, her daughters could not go to school because of Taliban-imposed rules, and one brother’s shop was judged un-Islamic — for selling clothes catering to women — and destroyed. Now the daughters cannot go to school because of the army-imposed curfew, and the army told her brothers to dismantle the homes of suspected militants (which exposes them to revenge). So after one month spent back in Charbagh, a former Taliban stronghold, the family opted to flee yet
again. — By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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Health Scientists
say they have made a dramatic breakthrough in understanding the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome – a debilitating condition affecting 250,000 people in Britain which for decades has defied a rational medical explanation. The researchers have discovered a strong link between chronic fatigue syndrome, which is sometimes known as ME or myalgic encephalomyelitis, and an obscure retrovirus related to a group of viruses found to infect mice. Although the published data falls short of proving a definitive cause-and-effect, one of the scientists behind the study said on Thursday night that she was confident that further unpublished data she had gathered over the past few weeks implicated the retrovirus as an important and perhaps sole cause of the condition. Chronic fatigue syndrome has blighted the lives of an estimated 17 million people worldwide because its The condition initially generated much controversy in the 1980s, when it was known as “yuppie flu”, because some medical authorities even doubted whether it was a genuine physical illness. In the absence of a proven cause, many scientists have questioned whether there could ever be one reason behind so many different symptoms, so the latest research showing a strong link to a single virus has generated intense excitement among experts. The study, published in the journal Science, shows that the virus, called murine leukaemia virus-related virus (XMRV), was found in 68 of 101 patients from around the US with chronic fatigue syndrome. This compared with just eight of 218 healthy “controls” drawn at random from the same parts of the US, the scientists said. But the senior author of the study, Judy Mikovits, director of research at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, said further blood tests have revealed that more than 95 per cent of patients with the syndrome have antibodies to the virus – indicating they have been infected with XMRV, which can lie dormant within a patient’s DNA. “With those numbers, I would say, yes we’ve found the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome. We also have data showing that the virus attacks the human immune system,” said Dr Mikovits. She is testing a further 500 blood samples gathered from chronic fatigue patients diagnosed in London. “The same percentages are holding up,” she said. If the findings are replicated by other groups and the XMRV virus is accepted as a cause of chronic fatigue syndrome then it could be possible to treat patients with antivirals, just like treating HIV, or to develop a vaccine against the virus to protect people from developing the condition, said Dr Mikovits. “We now have compelling proof that a retrovirus named XMRV is present in more than two-thirds of patient samples with chronic fatigue syndrome. This finding could be a major step in the discovery of vital treatment options for millions of patients,” she said. The genetic structure of the XMRV virus indicates that it has evolved from a similar virus found in wild field mice. Dr Mikovits suggested it could have jumped the “species barrier” from mouse to man like many other human viruses, such as HIV, another retrovirus, which is thought to have infected humans from monkeys or apes. XMRV was originally found in men suffering from prostate cancer and it was this discovery that led Dr Mikovits and her collaborators at the US National Institutes of Health to test blood samples stored from patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. “The discovery of XMRV in two major diseases, prostate cancer and now chronic fatigue syndrome, is very exciting. If cause-and-effect is established, there would be a new opportunity for prevention and treatment of these diseases,” said Professor Robert Silverman, of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, who worked on the fatigue syndrome study. However, other researchers emphasised that the numbers published so far are too small to conclude anything about the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome.n — By arrangement with
The Independent
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