cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/8176711

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/cfs by /u/Hip_III on 2026-04-15 02:41:59+00:00.

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From the 1970s onwards, a number of studies by British researchers found persistent enterovirus infections in ME/CFS patients' muscles. These many UK studies are detailed in an MEpedia article here.

The CDC saw all this research coming from the UK, and in 1994, conducted an in-house unpublished study on US ME/CFS patients to see if they could find enterovirus.

But the CDC made a fundamental mistake in their study: the CDC tested ME/CFS patients' blood for enterovirus by PCR, and could not detect the virus. So the CDC concluded that enterovirus was not involved in ME/CFS. And from that time onwards, enterovirus was largely ignored in the US as a causal factor for ME/CFS.

British researchers, however, were aware that the virus was not to be found in the blood, and knew the virus lived the tissues, so they tested muscle tissue samples for enterovirus, and were able to routinely detect enterovirus in ME/CFS patients. But for some reason, the CDC did not follow this methodology.

So this set back enterovirus ME/CFS research in the US for decades, until Dr John Chia came along and published his seminal 2008 study where he detected enterovirus in the stomach tissues of 82% of US ME/CFS patients.

Source: Dr John Chia, Invest in ME International ME Conference, London 2009: Diagnosis and Treatment of ME/CFS Associated With Chronic Enterovirus Infection. Timecode 22:30.