Along with Paul Cheney, Peterson was a treating physician at Incline Village during an outbreak of chronic fatigue syndrome that began in 1984 in the Lake Tahoe region. From 1984 to 1987, the illness was recorded in 259 patients in the area by the two physicians. The Lake Tahoe outbreak became the subject of several studies by Peterson and others. In 1995, Peterson and other investigators started conducting a 10-year follow-up study on patients seen during the outbreak. The study results were published in 2001 by the Journal of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In the 2000 CFS documentary I Remember Me, Peterson was interviewed about some of his experiences during the Lake Tahoe outbreak. In 1988, Peterson was the first physician to treat an extremely ill person diagnosed with CFS with the experimental drug Ampligen by obtaining compassionate-use permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Quantitative improvement in the first patient enabled the next pilot study of Ampligen in CFS patients by Peterson and other researchers. During the 1990 CFIDS Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, Peterson described positive results in 15 CFS patents after he treated them with Ampligen for approximately 6 months. In 1990 and 1991, Peterson was one of four principal investigators for the FDA approved phase II randomized placebo controlled double-blind study of the experimental intravenous drug Ampligen. The drug was administered in his Incline Village facility and three other sites. Peterson and others reported that there was statistically significant improvement in the patients receiving Ampligen. He is a principal investigator of the FDA-approved open-label safety and efficacy phase III drug study of Ampligen for treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome. Hemispherx Biopharma's New Drug Application for marketing and sale of Ampligen to treat chronic fatigue syndrome was rejected in December 2009 because the FDA concluded that the two RCTs "did not provide credible evidence of efficacy." Peterson was a member of the International Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Study Group that coauthored the most widely used clinical and research description of CFS, called the 1994 CDC definition, and the Fukuda definition. He is a coauthor of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Clinical Working Case Definition, Diagnostic and Treatment Protocols, initiated by Health Canada and published by an international group of researchers in 2003. Peterson, along with Annette and Harvey Whittemore, helped establish the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease at the University of Nevada in 2005 to aid patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and related illnesses. In October 2009 Peterson was interviewed on National Public Radio about his views on chronic fatigue syndrome and the newly published possible association with the retrovirus XMRV. In 2010, Peterson left WPI due to personal reasons. He stated there was a lack of collaboration with him over the research direction of the institute concerning XMRV. Peterson then teamed with Jay Levy, one of the original discoverers of HIV, to try to determine whether XMRV is truly present in patients by testing the same patients used in the study published in Science. They did not find indications of XMRV in the blood of the patients tested, and also concluded from their experiments that XMRV does not, "survive well in human blood", so human infection is unlikely. They also stated that research results published by others suggested that laboratory contamination may have resulted in false positive results in the original study.
Affiliations and awards
Peterson is a member of the board of directors and the scientific advisory board of the HHV-6 Foundation, a non-profit organization promoting human herpesvirus 6 associated scientific and clinical research. Peterson was part of the founding board and is a past-president of the International Association for CFS/ME, a professional organization advocating for the interests of CFS researchers and clinicians worldwide. In 2003, he received the Rudy Perpich award, an award given to distinguished CFS/FM scientists, physicians or healthcare workers, and in 2007, received the Nelson Gantz Outstanding Clinician Award from the International Association for CFS/ME. In 1999, Peterson was commended by the Assembly and Senate of the State of Nevada for his work and dedication to persons with chronic fatigue syndrome.
