Letter-Writing Campaigns

UK

Criona Wilson - mother of Sophia Mirza who was killed as a result of negligence and abuse by health-care professionals in the UK - has produced a letter which she is asking us to forward to our MP’s in the UK. You can find out more about Sophia here: www.sophiaandme.org.uk This letter is suitable for sending to MP’s in England, however, other UK countries have their own chief medical officers so that part of the letter will need to be edited appropriately. Scotland's new guide for GPs indicates that they are taking M.E. seriously as a physical illness.

You can find out who your MP is, along with their email and postal addresses here: http://www.parliament.uk/mpslordsandoffices/mps_and_lords/alms.cfm

You can find Criona Wilson's original letter here (scroll down) :http://www.sophiaandme.org.uk/w.h.o.%20and%20m.e..html
She urges you to copy and paste the text directly into your email.

Dear Your MP,
WhoAudits the WHO?
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) affects over 240,000 people in the UK and 25% of these people are so badly affected that they are house-bound or bed-bound. The illness is neurological; it affects all systems of the body and commonly affects many young people. M.E. has been classified by The World Health Organisation (WHO) as a physical disease since 1969.

In 2005, a young woman called Sophia Mirza died after doctors refused to recognise her ME as a serious physical disease and instead had her “sectioned” in a mental hospital because she insisted that M.E. was a physical disease and not a mental illness. She never recovered from her incarceration and later died. Examination of her spinal cord after death confirmed she was physically ill and this was reflected by the Coroner at her inquest in 2007. (For more information see www.sophiaandme.org.uk )

Nobody in the UK is acting to ensure that this situation does not happen again. Despite this being an disease which is classified by the WHO as neurological, NICE (who are supposedly “mandated” to follow WHO classifications, but do not), have produced Guidelines for doctors that concentrate only on mental health.

Recently, attention has been focussed on the wrongdoings of our financial institutions and more recently on our Parliamentary system. Both these institutions were regarded as sacrosanct and above question. Time has proven our confidence in those institutions to be misplaced.

Now it is time to look critically at the WHO which last year received a contribution of over £20,000,000 from the U.K. for 2009.

Officials at the WHO have been repeatedly asked to explain what powers they have to ensure that signatories abide by their classification system and what sanctions they can and do impose if member states fail to do so. They have failed to answer these questions.

In the case of ME can you please ask the Secretary Of State for Health to explain:
1) Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer of the U.K for the past ten years, is also an executive of the WHO. He has done nothing to ensure that M.E. is seen and treated as a physical disease in the UK; Why not?

2) Why NICE has not followed the WHO classification of ME as a neurological disease and how this can possibly be justified;

3) Why this physical disease is still being “managed” with purely psychological therapies with known adverse consequences;

4) Sir Liam apparently has no time to engage with the 240, 000 sufferers of this illness and yet can instantly devote his time and £7million of our money to an exaggerated influenza outbreak. How can this be?

My understanding of the situation is that our Health Ministry should take a lead from the World Health Organisation. When they ignore WHO Guidance and classification as they do in the case of ME, what remedy do we, patients and members of the public, have?

I look forward to your timely response,

Yours sincerely,

More information on letters written by Criona Wilson can be found here: http://www.sophiaandme.org.uk/w.h.o.%20and%20m.e..html

The website dedicated to Sophia Mirza and ME/CFS is http://www.sophiaandme.org.uk

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