any psychological component. In 1970, two British psychiatrists, McEvedy and Beard, reviewed the case notes of 15 outbreaks of benign myalgic encephalomyelitis and concluded that it was caused by mass hysteria on the part of patients, or altered medical perception of the attending physicians. Their conclusions were based on previous studies that found many normal physical test results, a lack of a discernible cause, and a higher prevalence of the illness in females. Consequently, the authors recommended that the disease should be renamed "myalgia nervosa". This perspective was rejected in a series of case studies by Dr. Melvin Ramsay and other staff of the Royal Free Hospital, the center of a significant outbreak. The psychological hypothesis posed by McEvedy and Beard created great controversy, and convinced a generation of health professionals in the UK that this could be a plausible explanation for the condition, resulting in neglect by many medical specialties. The specialty that did take a major interest in the illness was psychiatry. Because of the controversy, sociologists hypothesized that stresses of modern living might be a cause of the illness, while some in the media used the term "Yuppie flu" and called it a disease of the middle class. People with disabilities from CFS were often not believed and were accused of being malingerers. The November 1990 issue of Newsweek ran a cover story on CFS, which although supportive of an organic cause of the illness, also featured the term 'yuppie flu', reflecting the stereotype that CFS mainly affected yuppies. The implication was that CFS is a form of burnout. The term 'yuppie flu' is considered offensive by both patients and clinicians. In 2009, the journal Science published a study that identified the XMRV retrovirus in a population of people with CFS. Other studies failed to reproduce this finding, and in 2011, the editor of Science formally retracted its XMRV paper while the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences similarly retracted a 2010 paper which had appeared to support the finding of a connection between XMRV and CFS. Research funding United Kingdom The lack of research funding and the funding bias towards biopsychosocial studies and against biomedical studies has been highlighted a number of times by patient groups and a number of UK politicians. A parliamentary inquiry by an ad hoc group of parliamentarians in the United Kingdom, set up and chaired by former MP, Dr Ian