The word "cfs" is an abbreviation for "cubic feet per second." It is a commonly used term in engineering, hydrology, and other fields to measure the rate of flow of water or other fluids.
It is also used in discussions about water resources, such as rivers, streams, and irrigation systems. Example: The dam on the river has a maximum capacity of 10,000 cfs, but during heavy rains, it can reach up to 15,000 cfs.
It has even attracted a certain degree of media scepticism being dubbed, at one time, "yuppie flu".XMRV is certainly a reasonable candidate to cause CFS.
Writing in the Public Library of Science, Otto Erlwein of Imperial College, London, and his colleagues report that they are unable to find XMRV in any of almost 200 CFS patients in Britain.One possible explanation is that one of the two groups of scientists made a mistake in their testing, something that both are adamant is not the case.
Researchers at King's College, London, are exploring the causes of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).
But a psychiatric explanation would not delegitimise CFS.
They are receiving death threats for studying whether CFS might be rooted in the mind.The history of psychosomatic disorders is bumpy.
A watch and act message remains in force with the CFS warning the blaze is still a going fire.
A patient named Jennifer Brea, who is at work on a documentary about ME/CFS, told me that her fatigue is variable: it ranges from severe flu-like feelings to an acute sense that her very cells have lost all their energy, which can make it hard to get enough air to call out for help.
Surveys by two patient-advocacy groups, the Solve ME/CFS Initiative and ProHealth (the latter of which also markets nutritional supplements), found that up to three quarters of patients can expect to wait more than a year for a diagnosis, and nearly a third can expect to wait five years or more.
People with ME/CFS, the report noted, are more "functionally impaired" than those with Type 2 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and congestive heart failure — diseases that we know to be very grave indeed.
This way of thinking, which has usually produced excellent results, has had the unintended effect of making us skeptical of diseases whose etiologies are poorly understood — those, like ME/CFS, for which there isn't a clear single cause.
Because the biology of ME/CFS remains mysterious — because it exists in a gray area that our mechanistic, muscle-through-it culture treats warily — study of the disease has languished.
