excellent article on CDC with strong parallels to autism 'situation'

[Guest guest]

http://www.virology.ws/2011/11/23/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-and-the-cdc-a-long-tangled-tale/In fact, since the CDC first investigated an outbreak of a non-resolving, flu-like illness in the Lake Tahoe area in the mid-1980s,

the agency’s CFS program has been marked by financial scandal, an epidemiologic strategy rejected as fatally flawed by the top researchers

in the field, and the kind of toxic relationship with much of the patient community that can undermine the trust and cooperation needed for effective policy-making and public health strategies. On a more substantive level, over the past quarter-century, the CDC’s research program has yielded little or no actionable information about causes, biomarkers, diagnostic tests, or pharmaceutical treatments. Nor has the agency done much to track long-term outcomes–such as cancer rates, heart

attacks and suicides–among people with the illness.The reason for those failures, critics charge, is that the CDC has spent years looking in the wrong places. Starting with its 1988 report on the illness, they say, the agency has downplayed or dismissed abundant evidence that CFS is an organic disease, or cluster of diseases, characterized by severe immune-system and neurological dysfunctions as well as the frequent presence of multiple viral infections. Instead, say the critics, the agency has focused major resources on investigating proposed psychiatric and trauma-related factors and associations