Hillary Johnson Author, Journalist
@oslersweb
Investigating ME for 39 years The Why "Indispensable" Reimagining Ruth "..has a raw power" Osler's Web "A relentless, meticulous, highly persuasive expose"
Untold morbidity, unspeakable suffering. A pandemic ignored. "The Why: The Historic ME/CFS Call to Arms." A case history of what went wrong. amazon.com/Why-Historic-C…
A common virus once thought harmless to humans might be linked to Parkinson's disease, a new study says. The germ, Human Pegivirus (HPgV), was found in half the autopsied brains of patients with Parkinson's, but not in any brains from healthy people. 1/
What have doctors learned about myalgic encephalomyelitis in the last forty years? They have learned to keep a straight face when their patients tell them they have it.
Hard to imagine no one has ever done this experiment before...
Expanding blood volume in #MECFS patients with hypovolemia makes A LOT of sense (after all, this also increases cerebral blood flow) and is probably underrated: frontiersin.org/journals/neuro… Looking forward to the full publication!
From Australia: Distinct white matter alteration patterns in post-infectious and gradual onset chronic fatigue syndrome revealed by diffusion MRI Free fulltext: nature.com/articles/s4159… #MEcfs #CFS
Broken promises - Labour has turned its back on people with ME thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/…
An important paper
🔬 NEW from @CornellMECFS: Study reveals protein changes in #MECFS using blood-derived extracellular vesicles. First analysis in male patients shows altered EV cargo dynamics post-exercise. 🔓 Read: doi.org/10.1002/ctm2.7… 📊 Data: mapMECFS.org
Congratulations!
Today David Iu, a PhD student in Andrew Grimson's lab at the Cornell ME/CFS Center, passed his thesis exam. As well as co-authoring several published papers already, David will be completing another manuscript on immune cells in ME.
Axios reports fed judge orders grant funds recently cut to be restored at NIH. Judge Wm. Young said administration imposed its ideology on funding cuts. Per Axios, Young "said some evidence points to potential discrimination against women's health."
Unwilling---or unable? NIH's Brian Wallit, Avindra Nath face a delightful smack down of their $8 million, ten-year paper about "effort preference." A consortium of international scientists: "data provide no evidence" and "conclusions...unwarranted" frontiersin.org/journals/psych…
Hello Australia
Hey now, hey now Don’t dream it’s over …
#ChronicallyIgnored #Documentary 92 Minutes 1/3 The film "Chronically Ignored" will be available online for the first time internationally, starting Friday, June 6th, at 9 a.m (German Time) The link will be this here: vimeo.com/ondemand/chron… I hope everything will work. The…
Our latest ME/CFS paper examines the content of extracellular vesicles in male ME patients vs controls before and after exercise. Among pathways implicated are the TCA cycle, complement system, protein folding, ER stress tinyurl.com/266nsx9a
Myalgic encephalomyelitis, trivialized for 40 yrs by scientific community + public health, is a feminist issue. ME threatens women's autonomy, self-determination, and economic survival. Per CDC, almost 2 of every 100 citizens (1.7%) are female sufferers of ME, a living death.
I can't speak for the whole world, but I can speak for much of the German-speaking world: the ME/CFS genie is out of the bottle. No one can put it back in. They might still ignore it, they might still harm people—but it's in the open. The stigma around speaking up is broken.