Not that I can tell, any data is with the Australian Defence Force and due Privacy Laws and Medical In Confidance policies on their infomation, we cant get a mouses squeek out of them.

Hiding epidemiological data behind a shield of "medical privacy" is very dishonest in my opinion. It's very difficult to find out anything about diseases from federal agencies like the CDC too. They release only what they want the public to know...journalists have to use the Freedom of Information Act to pry things out of them. Few people know that the feds investigated outbreaks of ME/CFS before the 1980's.

I've had the staff in doctors' offices refuse to tell me anything about the doctor's qualifications and experience because they claimed that the medical privacy laws forbid it...which is of course totally untrue.

Medical privacy laws are enacted to protect the privacy of patients, not the inexperience or mistakes of doctors and bureaucrats.

Incline Village/Lake Tahoe outbreak was in 1984 to 1987 there were about 300 recorded patients. It wasn't really publicized and many just visit the area for recreation and if visitors got sick they probably weren't counted and may not have even been aware how sick they were. I was there every year either camping or skiing as it's only a 4 hr drive. I didn't start having symptoms that I was aware of until 10 yrs later.

OK, don't laugh! My husband won't mind...and this may have crossed other people's minds as well.

Let's suppose "someone" wanted to find a chemcal, a "way" to disable an enemy! Let's suppose that they found something that when inhaled or ingested would cause the enemy to be completely disabled....weakened to where they could not fight....rendering them helpless without killing them.

CFS/ME.....that's what's happened to us. Let's say this plan was carried out and many of us in many places were "tested" unbeknown to us??? Those of us who were already weakened with some other illness, possibly mono, a virus, pneumonia would succumb much quicker than the healthy public, but if this theory worked, and we were the enemy, we would be unable to fight. This could happen in any Country to many people, in areas where this theory was put to the test.

How's that for a conspiracy theory!! Too much NCIS??? I dunno!! So much about this illness is kept secretive and nobody wants to help us.

That conspiracy theory has been floating around for some time now, Darla. There are similar ones around HIV, ebola, and other diseases.

I heard of a conspiracy theory that the government tried to weed out undesirable elements of the population by forcibly sterilizing women from poor areas of the country. Unfortunately that one is true. It's also been proven true that they deliberately infected men of African heritage in the South with syphilis and left it untreated so they could study the illness.

So who knows what dark deeds they are capable of?

There are plenty of conspiracy theories about Lyme disease, including the notion that the US government actually created Lyme disease on Plum Island, an animal research laboratory based off the coast near Connecticut. No substantiated reason for the government to do such a thing has been given however, despite people comparing it to scandals such as syphilis experiments run by the US government in Guatemala in the 1940s.

I personally don't believe that we are victims of medical experimentation. But I also have experiences of both local and federal government officials lying to me, so I don't trust government agencies to be truthful.

The syphilis experiments may have only taken place in Guatemala, I don't remember exactly...not that it makes much difference. I do remember that they told the men in the study that they were giving them medicine for their illness while they were actually leaving it untreated.

I personally don't believe that we are victims of medical experimentation either (n/b they did use us ADF and most other countries who were involved in Gulf War) a guinea pigs with 'NBC' innculations though) but I do know that so much about this illness is kept secretive (Lipkin is just about to lift part of the lid little it more open) not even all General Practitioners Clinitians or Doctors are educated on it (in a 6 year Medical Degree in Australia somewhere in year 3, they currently do 2 days on it. How are they supposed to remember anything let alone D'x it when some poor soul wanders/ slides into their office years down the track ?) and not many people want to let us know the detail either (thank goodness for social networking, its where I have discovered almost everything, we have to research it ourselves and help is often pentioned out to us like minimum rations by Bureaucracies who are 10 years behind the 8 ball.

Re social networking and support here are just a few support groups around the world,
http://forums.phoenixrising.me/ ,
Dailystrength.org ,
mecfs.org.au ,
co-cure.org,
XMRV Global Action,
ME Association,
P.A.N.D.O.R.A., Inc. - Patient Alliance for Neuro-endocrine-immune Disorders Organization for Research & Advocacy, Inc.,
ME/CFS-Evolving Science,
The CFIDS Association of America, Action for M.E.,
Irish Dysautonomia Awareness,
Campaign for M.E. Services in N.I,
Fundaci per a la Fibromyalgia i la Sndrome de Fatiga Crnica,
ME/CFS Foreningen - Danish ME/CFS Association,
International M.E. Association,
New Jersey Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Association, Inc. (NJCFSA),
Blue Ribbon Campaign for ME.org,
Get Well From M.E,
ME-CFSKnowledgeCenter.com,
Diagnose Support,
Adrienne Dellwo's Fibromyalgia & Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Page,
FRIENDS because we have Fibro and/or CFS/ME!!,
ANIDA,
Me/CFS Liverpool UK Support Group,
FMS/CFS/ME Information,
CFS Nova,
The Vermont CFIDS Association,
Phoenix Rising,
The Wheel,
ESME European Society for ME,
Coalition 4 ME / CFS, ME / CFS Worldwide Patient Alliance (MCWPA),
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Research Foundation,
Sindrome de Fatiga Cronica,
National ME/FM Action Network,
I have Fibromyalgia / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but it Doesn't Have Me!,
CFS Associazione Italiana / CFS Italian Association,
ME/CFS Western Australia,
ME/CFS South Australia,
ME/CFS Queensland,
ME/CFS New South Wales,
CFS Solutions of West Michigan,
Hunter-Hopkins Center,
Simmaron Research,
R.M.C.F.A. - Rocky Mountain CFS / ME & FM Association

Re Clinicians, Specialists, Lead Researchers, Researchers, and Academics who aremaking a differance;
like Bruce M. Carruthers,
Marjorie I. van de Sande,
Kenny L. De Meirleir,
Nancy G. Klimas,
Gordon Broderick,
T. Mitchell,
D. Staines,
A. C. P. Powles,
N. Speight,
Derek Enlander,
Terusha Miike,
Kenneth J. Friedman,
Benjamin Katz,
Jose Alegre,
Byron M. Hyde,
Elizabeth Unger,
Lucinda Bateman,
Rosemary Underhill,
Rosamund Vallings,
Alan Gurwitt, M.D.
Christine Kozak,
Mangalathu S. Rajeevan,
B. Baumgarten-Austrheim,
David S. Bell,
Lea Steele,
N. Jose Montoya,
Seiki Tajima,
Virginia R. Falkenberg,
Carlo-Stella,
Lina Garcia,
Jonathan P. Dyke,
J. Chia,
Maureen Hanson,
Ekua W. Brenu,
Fred Friedberg,
Leonard Jason,
Charles W. Lapp,
Henry Butt,
Staci R. Stevens.
A. Darragh,
D. Jo,
Donald Lewis,
Andrew H. Miller,
A. R. Light,
Sonya Marshall-Gradisbik,
I. Mena,
Judy A. Mikovits,
K. Miwa,
M. Murovska,
Martin L. Pall,
S. Stevens,
Charles Lapp,
Ian Lipkin,
Anthony Komaroff,
Dr Dane Cook,
Dr Spyros Deftereos,
Dr. Suzanne Vernon,
Dr. Sanjay Shukla
Dr. Patrick McGowan,
Dr. Marvin S. Medow,
Dr Peter Rowe and all of the thousand other Clinicians, Researchers, Academics that I am niave off.

Always there is Hope.

Thanks for posting those lists, Al. I copied and pasted both of them into my ME file.

I doubt if most American medical schools devote more than a few minutes to ME/CFS. And of course the doctors don't always take what they are taught to heart. Dr. Nancy Klimas told a local support group in Cape Coral, FL that she is deeply disappointed in some of the med students she taught. She said they apparently completely disregarded everything she taught them about ME/CFS when they began practicing medicine.

Cheney & Peterson were the original GPs involved w/ the Incline Village outbreak. Are they both still active? Benjamin Natelson is/was in charge of the big research center in north Jersey looking into CFS & Gulf War Syndrome.

In the early 90s I went as a visitor & advocate to a CFS Advisory Committee that met regularly w/ the US Secretary of Health & Human Services as well as the Social Security Administration. An advocate friend who lived near DC went regularly & might have been a committee member. At one end of the room was a two-way mirror & the meeting was miked & recorded. The friend told me that there were generals on the other side of the mirror watching & listening in because he saw them exit the room & bumped into them in the hall. I've got to assume that they were interested b/c of the implications of CFS in regard to Gulf War Syndrome.

Drs. Cheney and Peterson are both very much involved in the study of ME/CFS from what I've heard. Dr Peterson kept records of all the patients he's treated and his data are an important resource for anyone who wants to track the continuing struggles of ME/CFS patients over a long period of time.

The military do like to keep their cards close to their vests, as the old saying goes. Information tends to flow into our government in a torrent and come back out in a trickle of edited, rewritten, redacted public releases.

During World War Two, sinkings of ships involving loss of many lives were kept from the public in the belief that it could negatively affect morale. Even when government officials tell the truth, it may not be the whole truth.

Dr. Peterson is very active in CFS research. He left the WPI after having launched it when the Whittemore's started acting crazy.

Dr. Peterson was a treating physician at Incline Village during an outbreak of CFS that began in 1984 in the Lake Tahoe region.

Dr. Peterson founded Simmaron Research Inc. in April 2011 to fund and conduct pilot studies in collaboration with others to further advance the discovery of diagnostic markers and potential treatment options for CFS patients.

In 2011, Dr. Peterson was appointed adjunct professor on the faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine at Bond University in Queensland, Australia.

I met a married couple thru my old support group who became ill after visiting upstate NY near the Lyndonville area where DR David Bell was active. They weren't there during the outbreak, let me add.

The husband was much sicker initially, but by the time I met them, he was starting to improve while the wife was getting worse. In fact, I believe he went back to work while she had to quit her job. All this illness & friction ended in divorce, sad to say. I'm pretty sure they did not drink any unpasteurized milk while there.

I'm not ready to accept these explanations that we have something wrong that was caused by various triggers and now we're all out of balance physiologically. That just sounds like a cover story to me. Biologically it doesn't hold water, animal physiology just does not work that way.

I think there's something going on here, and the doctors at the CDC know there is...but they just don't want to deal with it. The longer they put off dealing with it, the worse it would look for them if it finally does turn out we have a contagious disease...so they have even more motivation to keep sweeping us all under the carpet.

These are just my intuitive feelings after having read reams of material about ME/CFS. I do have credentials in the field of biology, so this isn't just a blind guess.

According to some doctors, we supposedly were pushed into a kind of failure mode physiologically by a trauma to our system like a viral infection that has long since gone. That just sounds like a bunch of garbage someone made up so they could drop the subject and move on to something else that's easier to solve. I don't buy one bit of it.