Will another long-mysterious disease turn out to have been caused by a Virus all along before 2023?
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10
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resolved Jan 6
Resolved
NO
Epstein-Bar has recently been very credibly fingered as the leading cause of Multiple Sclerosis: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/epstein-barr-virus-may-be-leading-cause-of-multiple-sclerosis/ Will we discover that some other mysterious disease of unknown origin is caused by a Virus? #virus #medicine #science
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predicted YES

Gonna need some help from the commentariat to properly resolve this one, as I'm going to have to pore through evidence over the last year to make sure I haven't missed anything.

Here's a study that seems to indicate that viruses have something to do with at least some forms of Alzheimer's:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197458022002585?via%3Dihub

Here's another one that suggests that enterovirus causes Acute Flacid Myelitis (AFM):
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2118155

The first one looks like it was published within the relevant resolution window, the second one I'd need to do more research.

Please post any of your own findings/opinions concerning research papers from the last year

predicted NO

@LarsDoucet neither of those are scientific consensus, just suspect or associated. You need way more evidence to say that it is the cause.

predicted YES

@egroj That's what I figured. Do you know where's a good place to see if anything like this came out in the last year?

predicted NO

@LarsDoucet Neither of these look feel like a particularly good slam dunk.

You get 100 theories on Alzheimer's a year. There doesn't seem to be any consensus that "we've got it, it was secretly this one little virus all along."

The second one is a single case study of one child, supporting an existing theory that was pushed since 2014, and so isn't actually new in this year.

At the end of the day it is your market and you can resolve it as you will, but I do not feel either of these is sufficient evidence for what you are trying to find.

predicted NO

@LarsDoucet At the end of the day, that is literally what a market like this is for. If someone finds evidence for it, they are actively incentivized to advertise it here to ensure the market resolves their way. In order for it to be possible to extract bits of information here, the burden of proof seems to have to lie on YES, though. Otherwise NO can provide no signal to the market, and you've had folks scouring the internet looking for counter arguments for a year or so because, since June they could pull a 4:1 ROI, and hell, especially at the end here, they could pull 100+:1 returns just by providing you one good example.

predicted YES

@EdwardKmett Yeah, good point. Well, I'll give everybody 24 hours and then resolve this.

predicted YES

@LarsDoucet Perhaps the same amount of evidence as what was agreed for Epstein-Barr is called for?

predicted YES

@RayDoraisamy That'd be nice! Post it if you got it!

predicted YES

@LarsDoucet Got no smoking gun, but you'll probably find this of interest: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2023202118

bought Ṁ80 of NO
Base rate seems way lower here. Even if you update hard on MS and assume that'll drive more research into virally caused diseases, the work has to complete before EOY, which seems unlikely unless they get really lucky.
bought Ṁ20 of YES
there are so many sneaky viruses we're just learning about... seems plausible