WASHINGTON — Two new studies say a link between a virus and chronic fatigue syndrome probably was a false alarm caused by laboratory mistakes, yet another blow to sufferers of the mysterious illness who hope that finding a cause will lead to a cure.
The journal Science took the unusual step Tuesday of declaring the virus link “seriously in question,” making it the latest potential culprit that could fall by the wayside.
In a headline-making discovery, Nevada researchers in 2009 announced they had found traces of a mouse-related virus in the blood of a number of patients with chronic fatigue, an illness thought to afflict about 1 million Americans.
The finding fueled hope that a cause might finally have been found even as it led blood banks to turn away donations from chronic-fatigue patients — and prompted some patients to try out antiviral medicines normally used for HIV.
Doubt already was growing among many other scientists, as numerous other studies failed to find any connection between the purported infection and human illness.
