Like approximately 500 residents in Harrow borough, I have the devastating neuro-immune disease myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

It is as disabling as multiple sclerosis and many people are ill for decades.

My own illness started after a glandular fever infection and I’ve been ill for six years now.

I recently lost the job I had had for more than a decade because of the illness.

It can strike any racial, ethnic or socio- economic group and at any age, and it often starts as a result of an infection.

There is now an abundance of evidence that the illness is biomedical, with abnormalities in multiple systems in the body, including the immune, nervous and hormone systems, as well as the heart.

There is a desperate need for more research. Many children have the disease and some do not recover and never have the chance to complete their education, have a career, marry or have a family.

Internationally-renowned researcher Dr Ian Lipkin, of Columbia University in New York, who is well-known for helping to contain the SARS epidemic in China, is raising money for a study of the bacteria, viruses and fungi in the gut and their role in ME/CFS, using highly sophisticated DNA sequencing techniques.

Dr Lipkin believes that the gut microbes are “where the action is” in this terrible illness.

In the UK, a much-needed biobank has also been set up — the first of its type in Europe — collecting blood and tissue samples from patients.

It is led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and serves as an open resource for biomedical research into ME/CFS, enabling a wide range of research studies.

Both these initiatives could lead to a desperately needed understanding of what causes this disease and how to treat it.

However, both are under-funded, and urgently in need of donations.

I have donated to this research and I hope other Harrow Times readers will too, via www.microbediscovery.org and www.lshtm.ac.uk/ mecfs

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