By Cheryl Tai

From Summer 2015 Forum

Newsweek is a magazine that has been known for leading stories to keep one updated on world news. In 1992, they actually had a cover story on “chronic fatigue syndrome” and had to go into a second printing for the first time in their history when patients throughout the country bought every available issue. Newsweek announced in that issue that the patients had the same immune dysfunctions as those found in AIDS but none were positive to AIDS. Of course, shortly afterward, the author of that report was sent overseas! And, of course, the CDC does not admit that certain T and B-cell abnormalities are found in this illness to this very day but are the opposite (high/low) abnormality than those found in AIDS.

Just recently, Newsweek was again truthful when reporting on “CFS” when a story written by Felicity Capon compared another new and “mysterious” disease to CFIDS/ME. The new disease first seemed to surface in 2013 and a university in Russia has been studying it looking for answers. A leading professor from Tomsk Polytechnic University, Dr. Leonid Rikhvanov, is of the belief that it could be from gasses emanating from an old uranium mine but no scientific consensus has yet been proven. The article said, “Rikyvanov does not presently believe the disease to be a completely new one, as the symptoms are similar to chronic fatigue syndrome disease, caused by radiation…”

Indeed, there are books available from Russia and the Ukraine that are on radiation and many list CFIDS/ME. If one goes to our website, they’ll even see an article entitled “Uranium Properties and biological effects after internal contamination” that is written by Souidi et al. where it explains that “uranium is a radionuclide present in the environment since the origin of the Earth.”

On the NCF site on the web, there is also a course paper that mentions the connection of ionizing radiation exposure on “chronic fatigue syndrome” that was written by our own Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in 2008. There are several physicians from the U.S. who have had their names listed among the authors that were published by a research team from an Australian university. In fact, they mention one of the particular decreased natural killer cells that both Dr. Daniel Peterson and Dr. Nancy Klimas, in two separate articles written by that group, are well-known to be especially associated with ionizing radiation yet neither of these physicians is known to have ever acknowledged that fact publicly.

Gulf War Illness (GWI) is another illness that the IOM decided to rename a year before they did that with CFIDS/ME. GWI affects more than 250,000 veterans that fought in the war against Iraq in 1991. Unfortunately, there has been less scientific work to look into what these veterans are suffering with than there has been for CFIDS/ME. Many have tried, just as in “CFS”, to tie GWI to a psychological problem. One of the latest studies done on GWI was done by a researcher who also has proven many things in CFIDS/ME, Dr. James Baraniuk, a professor from Georgetown University Medical Center. Indeed, the headline of the story that appeared in USA Today that was written by Kelly Kennedy, announced “Researchers tie Gulf War Syndrome to brain damage” and stated “that proof may ultimately help civilians who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia.” Published in a PLOS One medical journal in March of this year, the study used fMRI machines and were able to see abnormalities within the nerve fibers that are able to interpret pain signals in the brain and that finding fully disproves any psychological cause of GWI.

An fMRI is an MRI that is “functional” and is able to measure the blood flow that takes place in the brain. Indeed, there are many veterans who were not getting any government benefits or treatment because , as Dr. Baraniuk explained, “That’s a problem with all physicians, VA military or civilian. If it doesn’t fall within their small world of known diseases, then the patient is nuts.” That particular area of white matter that was looked at in the brain demonstrates pain signals when the patient is at rest and then when they are on a bicycle. The testing would actually demonstrate how the fibers interpret even a normal function to be painful. When compared to healthy controls, those with GWI had fibers that had deteriorated. Indeed, the researchers feel that these problems of these veterans came from environmental factors that give symptoms that may sound familiar to PWC/ME patients such as hair loss, light and noise sensitivity, tight muscles and blurred vision.

Even those on the team of researchers were surprised that GWI has been ignored. As Dr. Baraniuk said to the author of the USA Today article, “If 30% of Congress got sick or 30% of Manhattan got sick, there would have been an outcry.”