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On October 10, 1982, just days before my 32nd birthday, I attended the wedding of Steve Ross, who owned Warner Communications and its subsidiary, Atlantic Records. The man I was dating at the time was a well-regarded investigative journalist who seemed to know everyone, from the neo-con policy-makers in the Reagan administration, to entertainers like Carly Simon, as well as every independent writer of note then residing in New York City and a large cast of movers and shakers in the city’s media and business elite. Ross, his friend, was marrying a twenty-seven-year old documentary filmmaker and Texan named Courtney Sale in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. (more…)

Pandemic influenza strains---what does history teach us?

Rolling Stone.com has re-published Hillary Johnson's 1998 story, "Killer Flu," on the influenza threat. To read, click the link to Rolling Stone.com on the Home Page.

This post was inspired by the testimony of Kathryn Stephens to the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Advisory Committee (CFSAC) on May 27th, 2009.





Number of years since the CDC investigated the outbreak at Lake Tahoe:

24



Number of years after the Lake Tahoe outbreak that the CDC held its first press conference on the disease:

22


What CDC director Julie Gerberding said at that press conference:


“One of the things that CDC hopes to do through our communications strategy is to help patients know that they have an illness that requires medical attention.”


Number of Directors at the Centers for Disease Control since the Nevada outbreak in 1984:

6

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On May 28th, I addressed a gathering of seventy-five people in London on the eve of an international medical conference on myalgic encephalomyelitis. The conference was held in the heart of London—a veritable stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament—in an ornate nineteenth century building with the evocative address, One Birdcage Walk. I was invited to speak by Invest in M.E., a British charity formed by parents of severely ill children with M.E., whose leaders have now held four such meetings in as many years. I suspect these gatherings are soon to be, if they aren't already, a highly anticipated fixture in the M.E. cosmos, drawing patients and advocates, parents of patients, scientists and doctors from a multitude of countries and at least two continents.

I will write about my impressions of the conference shortly. For now, I am posting my speech, the topic of which was the influence of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on the pandemic disease myalgic encephalomyelitis. The reach of this federal agency forms a tragic history in the annals of American medicine, a history that I needed to sharply abbreviate due to time considerations. My purpose was to be informative; I tried to find humor where I could.

Invest in M.E. filmed the entire day-long conference and my pre-conference presentation, and will provide a DVD of these events very soon. To my deeply committed, hard working British hosts: I was honored to have been invited to England and been afforded the great privilege of speaking my mind.

The speech begins below...






“THE WHY”


Copyright © 2009 by Hillary Johnson. All Rights Reserved.


I am flattered to have been asked to speak here tonight in the beautiful city of London by Invest in ME. It’s an honor to be with this very special international audience on English ground where investigators like Sir Donald Acheson, John Richardson, Melvin Ramsay, J. Gordon Parish, Malcolm Hooper—and many others—have written, and many are still writing, a chapter in medical history that will stand for the ages. The clinician Sir William Osler wrote, “..in the faculty of observation, the Greeks were our masters-- we must return to their methods if progress is to be made.” And I think, in the UK, these doctors have emulated the Greeks.

I’m going to be talking tonight about the uniquely ambitious American institution, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Now, the only thing Greek about the CDC is the frat boy atmosphere I encountered when I first ventured there in 1987 as part of my reporting for my book Osler’s Web.

Before I embark on my deconstruction, if you will, of the CDC’s nefarious conduct in the realm of M.E., a phenomenon that has scorched the sufferers of this disease on every continent, I would like to make a few comments about the immediate present.

This pandemic, by which I mean the surge of cases that began in the early to middle 1980s, has been with us for close to a quarter of a century—a human generation. Millions around the globe are sick. I think it’s fair to say that people who suffer from this disease are collectively heartbroken. We mourn the children we were never able to have because this disease stole our youth. We mourn the loss of our most productive years. We grieve that we may miss an old age of fond memories. Some of us may have given up worrying about ourselves and can only worry about future generations.

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