Twitter account will provide headlines & quotes from the 1955 Royal Free Hospital outbreak to the day when each headline appeared - 65 years later

https://twitter.com/user/status/1293606828178313217

https://twitter.com/user/status/1293694758544723971

https://twitter.com/user/status/1294249132618657792


https://twitter.com/user/status/1294250880087265284


https://twitter.com/user/status/1294346742603882496

 

Very interesting paper linked to this tweet
https://twitter.com/user/status/1294997080772091905

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1294997967246708737

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1294998823358603264

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1295020239768489985

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1294785797665755136

 

How familiar are people with this paper? I've had one person on Twitter say they were not aware of it.

 

There seems to be a general lack of awareness about the epidemics and their relationship to ME even among modern biomedical researchers.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1294997967246708737


https://twitter.com/user/status/1294998823358603264


https://twitter.com/user/status/1295020239768489985


https://twitter.com/user/status/1295135423002562560


https://twitter.com/user/status/1295438867739312128

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1295498225030316032


https://twitter.com/user/status/1295712341850562561


https://twitter.com/user/status/1295738659757490176


https://twitter.com/user/status/1295859251013976064


https://twitter.com/user/status/1296090496163618816

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1296221757486108672


https://twitter.com/user/status/1296222072939610115


https://twitter.com/user/status/1296414704437518336


https://twitter.com/user/status/1296423688909266945

 

Oh, good. I prefer to give Twitter as a little additional revenue as possible.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1296501485019299840

https://twitter.com/user/status/1296583666496413699

https://twitter.com/user/status/1296760763173003265

https://twitter.com/user/status/1296947662013464577


https://twitter.com/user/status/1297442942647508992

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1298395309652021248

https://twitter.com/user/status/1298693324136763400


https://twitter.com/user/status/1298721344947855360

 

That 21 August Tweet is interesting reporting "Gordon" as saying that no-one at Atlanta had ever heard of McEvedy and Beard. I presume that the Gordon is Parish, and that this must have come soon after the Atlanta meeting on 27 April 1987. That seems strange. Shelokov had certainly heard of them, but that was presumably understood and taken for granted. The suspicion is that Holmes had, as he had earlier referred to "an epidemic of diagnosis", which is pretty much the M and B terminology for the Middlesex Hospital outbreak. It would be surprising if he had come up with that if he was unaware of M and B.

This is where the strange report from Alfred Freindly appearing in the LA Times in 1970 comes in. Although M and B were not mentioned by name one would expect the subject matter to have been noted. My original thought was that the article was syndicated and would have appeared first in the WP and possibly elsewhere as well. But there is a troubling "Exclusive" at the top of the article. Admittedly that may mean merely that it was exclusive for downtown LA, but the normal use has also to be considered.

Clearly the article was written with publication in DC in mind, otherwise the other US outbreaks and not merely Chestnut Lodge would have been mentioned. Did the WP know it was rubbish and avoid publication in an area where it might be seen by those involved, 17 years before. It might also have seemed strange to have described as hysteria an outbreak which all the resources of the NIH had put down to a " Bethesda-Ballerup strain of paracolon" infection, perhaps the NIH might have felt compelled to defend their diagnosis if publication had been in DC. Shelokov had, after all, been head of the relevant Department at NIH for a few years until 1967 or 68.

The question therefor arises as to whether those at the meeting did know, but weren't admitting it, or whether those who did know were not at the meeting. If the latter is the case that would support the contention that those involved in the original CFS description knew little about ME.

 

I've posted an update on Twitter re your post.

 

There is an interesting wrinkle, well I find it so, to the story Of Shelokov and the alleged absence of knowledge about McE and B amongst his professional colleagues. Shelokov appears to have been the one US practitioner who engaged with the UK ME/PVFS specialists in the 1970's. He attended the 1978 meeting. It seems that he was out of favour with his former colleagues because they thought he was involved in bio-weapons research. No. This is not just me and my conspiracy theories. That comes from his obituary in the Lancet.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)31153-4/fulltext

 

Saga of Royal Free Disease by Dr Melvin Ramsay

https://meassociation.org.uk/product/saga-of-royal-free-disease/

 

Something interesting coming up about that - but later on in the story.

 

I have been looking through the McE Thesis again. We all know the story of how it could be described as hysteria because it appeared only to affect young nurses. In that context these quotes seemed relevant

It was decided to limit the follow-up to nurses: they formed a
uniform social group and provided their own controls, they had also clearly
been the nuclear population in the epidemic as well as the population with
the highest attack rate...

...Accordingly each of the nurses who had been affected by the epidemic
illness between 16. 7. 55 and 31. 10. 55 was paired with a nurse who had
been equally exposed but had not had the illness. Nurses born before
1926 (i. e. who were older than 29 at the time of the epidemic) were excluded
as being atypical of the group as a whole and impossible to match exactly

They call it science, or so I am led to believe.