The latest issue of the ME Association’s quarterly magazine, ME Essential, is landing on members’ doormats this week with an extra heavy thump. 

Friday, July 25

Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

Calling all physically fit carers, friends and relatives of ME patients. Your help is very urgently needed and may be of great assistance to the UK ME community.

from BBC Online, 23 July 2008

Our medical adviser Dr Charles Shepherd comments:  "The important message here is that taking too much fluid/water (ie overhydration) can be just as dangerous as not taking enough fluid/water (ie dehydration)."

A woman has been awarded more than £800,000 after she suffered permanent brain damage while on a detox diet.

Pictured, from the left: Jim Moran, Willy Hopkins, Willy Bearpark and Charlie Hagan.

Workers on an oil platform 130 miles north east from Aberdeen in the North Sea have produced some black gold – especially for The ME Association!

There was a good eight-minute discussion on the proposed Employment and Support Allowance which will replace Incapacity Benefit on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours programme this week – featuring Jemma Packett who has ME. Listen here.

Following the appointment of Sir Leszec Borysiewicz as the new Chief Executive at the Medical Research Council (MRC), the MEA wrote to the MRC to ask for a meeting to discuss the scandalous lack of government funded or commissioned research into both the underlying cause of this illness and approaches to management that are not simply behavioural (ie cognitive behaviour therapy/CBT and graded exercise therapy/GET).  This correspondence can be found here. 

The ME Association is pleased to announce that we have been informed by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) that they will now remove their classification of CFS as a mental health disorder.

We reproduce below the transcripts of all four of the presentations on Child Protection Issues that were given to the All Party Parliamentary Group on ME at Westminster on Wednesday, July 2.

Disabled people who live in Kent, south London and parts of east Sussex are being invited by the Southeastern Railway to take part in an online survey to find out what encourages them to use their passenger services– or indeed prevents them from taking the train.