Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Scandal Silver Lining?

Check out The New York Times article via Instapundit for the details.

Quotes that indicate something good may have come out of this fiasco:

The events of the past couple of years, though disheartening to chronic fatigue syndrome patients, may have a silver lining: Research into the disease, much of it privately financed, is ratcheting up.

and

“The disease had languished in the background at N.I.H. and C.D.C., and other scientists had not been paying much attention to it,” said John Coffin, a professor of molecular biology at Tufts University. “This has brought it back into attention.”

Dr. Coffin, who at first supported the mouse retrovirus theory but later disputed it, noted that the illness “does seem to have characteristics that would suggest infectious origins” and that other retroviruses could be involved.

It has been a bleak thing waiting for medical science to come up with anything to deal with the illness and I stopped holding my breath for even a treatment a long time ago. It is one of many things that caused me to lose what little faith I had left in government organizations to solve problems, but only one. My hopes are that the private sector’s ability to innovate will eventually pay off though I doubt it will be in my lifetime. So little is truly understood about the immune system that the science involved can only be considered to be in its infancy.