Ted Van Zelst, a soft-spoken civil engineer from Illinois, died on July 6th at 86, the
Chicago Tribune has reported.
Van Zelst was the first major advocate for this disease on the national scene, becoming in 1986 the first member of the public—and one of the few in history—to testify before powerful Senate and House subcommittees with control over the purse strings of the federal health agencies. Van Zelst also testified in 1987, 1988 and 1989.
He was no amateur. He was, instead, an artful persuader who sat down before Congress armed with sophisticated data. He knew how and where to apply pressure, reaching out to powerful politicians and going so far as to commission his own research surveys in order to provide rock-solid evidence in his testimonies. He was generous, too, providing seed money to researchers who wanted to conduct pilot studies on the disease.
“Ted Van Zelst was the first public citizen to be visible to Congress on this issue,” said Harvard’s Anthony Komaroff when I called him about Van Zelst last week. “We met by phone about twenty-five years ago. He gave us our first research funding before we got federal grant support. His support was valuable in jumpstarting our work and making us qualify for federal funding.”
“He was impressive for several reasons,” Komaroff continued. “One was how keenly he understood some of the medical issues around this illness even though he was not a health care professional…[But] the most important thing to say about Ted, in terms of the history of CFS, is probably that he was singularly the most important public figure to encourage Congress to spend federal money to try to understand this disease better.”
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