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by Source: The Boston Globe
January 1, 1999
More Americans suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome than breast cancer, lung cancer, or infection with HIV. Yet this illness, or cluster of illnesses, has not yet yielded a definite cause or a successful cure.
For too long the indefiniteness of chronic fatigue and its vague name have misled some physicians and skeptics in the press to belittle the illness as a phantom disorder. But the patients who have it know they are unwell physiologically, and more and more researchers and clinicians have taken up the hunt for diagnostic markers to define the disease, its origins, and its treatment.
Researchers at the Fourth International Research, Clinical, and Patient Conference on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, held recently in Cambridge, reported on diverse markers for the syndrome, among them an enzyme dysfunction, orthostatic intolerance (discomfort in standing upright), and a high incidence of an activated virus known as HHV-6. The search for markers is crucial not only to point researchers toward causes and cures but also to enable scientists to win funding for their research and people disabled by the syndrome to receive disability payments.
The difficulties encountered by people with chronic fatigue and those trying to understand it, treat it, or cure it illustrate just how political the contemporary realms of science and health care have become. The American Association for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome has no choice but to engage in a competitive struggle for research funds. And when an exciting prospective treatment such as the antiviral drug Ampligen is tested, the association confronts the daunting task of trying to bring down the $15,000 annual cost of Ampligen treatment, much as AIDS activists are pushing to bring down the price of protease inhibitors. It is an effort that deserves support.
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