A New ME Outbreak?
A group of mostly female students aged 12 to 19 in San
Antonio, Texas, have come down with a constellation of symptoms physicians are
terming unusual. Those symptoms
include chronic fatigue, headaches, nausea, vertigo, stomach problems and
seizure-like activity. In a recent news segment by San Antonio reporter Sarah
Lucero, a mother of one of the girls said that one doctor accused her daughter
of faking it—because the symptoms are so uncommon—and urged psychiatric care.
In the segment, other diseases that afflict teenagers are
mentioned, including “chronic fatigue syndrome, postural tachycardia syndrome or POTS.”
When will doctors get it that POTS often goes hand-in-hand with chronic fatigue syndrome and that these Texas students probably have CFS? Perhaps when the name CFS is changed to
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) or something else that explains how serious this
disease really is.
One bright light: The San Antonio illness is being termed
“neuroimmune syndrome.”
Has CDC gone to San Antonio to investigate? My bet is no.
Sadly, the mother of the teenage girl in the piece is taking
her daughter to the Mayo Clinic for help. Perhaps more than any other hospital
in the United States, the Mayo Clinic is known for its dismissal and
psychologizing of ME. The most
egregious example that I know of:
Back in the 1980s, Nancy Kaiser, who suffered from a severe case of ME—before she had a
name for it—traveled to more than 200 physicians for help until she found
ME-literate physician Daniel Peterson. One of her stops along the way was Mayo.
During the visit, Nancy had a seizure—she had multiple
seizures every day before going on the experimental drug Ampligen—and fell off
her chair. The Mayo physician kicked her and told her that she was faking
it. Nancy, of course, had no
memory of the event, but her husband, Jim, who accompanied her, certainly
did. Nancy died of ME in 2008.
To view the San Antonio news segment, click here.
To view the San Antonio news segment, click here.
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My thanks to Zac for emailing the clip about the San Antonio
students.
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