Everything you wanted to know about ME

Thanks to an excellent pair of companion articles for ME Awareness Week 2008 (The Problem With ME and A Helping Hand For Sufferers, Weekender, May 10), the people of Malta will now know as much as anyone does, anywhere in the world, about this dreadfully debilitating illness.

They will know that ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) is misunderstood, disbelieved, scorned, hard to diagnose, largely invisible, severely disabling and that there is, as yet, no cure. Sadly, there are some more sinister features, not at all exclusive to Malta but which, disgracefully, are common around the world.

They include apathy, lack of investment, secrecy and bullying which promote despair among sufferers and, in the worst cases, suicide.

Ignorance is forgivable if it is accompanied by a willingness to learn but learning comes with research and there is a general unwillingness to invest public money into biomedical research. There is inadequate or non-existent welfare support for ME sufferers while they are unable to work, secrecy among medical and political policy makers and, if not fear, why do ME sufferers feel they have to hide their names and faces? It seems that not only do 18th or 19th century attitudes to this illness still exist but also primitive behaviour that belongs to Neanderthal man.

Well done Malta for speaking up. Let's hope that others around the world follow your laudable example.