Awful plight of those with ME
As the parent of a young woman who has suffered with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) for 21 years since the age of eight, I was deeply moved by your article on long Covid in children (“
‘Their childhood has been stolen’: calls for action to tackle long Covid”, News).
But while I was relieved that so much attention is being paid to a new chronic and horrific condition, I felt like weeping for my daughter and the thousands like her, who have been ignored, disbelieved and vilified for years, not least by many medical professionals who should have been there to help and support them.
Like long Covid, ME typically follows a viral infection. Even when such an infection is easy to discover (as in the case of the Epstein-Barr virus) and precedes the onset of ME, the lack of a diagnostic test means that the symptoms of sufferers are often misunderstood as psychological, with the result that the need for vital biomedical research into ME has been consistently dismissed by successive governments. It would seem that it always takes a tragedy for action to be taken; perhaps the tragedy of long Covid will bring action for the desperate plight of those with ME.
