We would like to thank journalist Sandra Aloisio for the excellent piece she wrote on ME, which was featured in last Sunday’s magazine Alive & Healthy. She tackled the subject sensitively, accurately and professionally.

However, we also wish to highlight the fact that Dr Natasha Azzopardi Muscat must be misinformed and therefore misleading when she states that “ME patients are seen by the necessary consultants at Mater Dei”.

All the members of our support group can unanimously verify that none of these ‘consultants’ whether at Mater Dei or any other private hospital or clinic know how to diagnose ME apart from one or two exceptions (who sadly do so by exclusion diagnosis, which risks missing other equally serious diseases), let alone treat the patient! To the best of our knowledge nothing has changed.

The contradiction in terms is that while Dr Azzopardi Muscat claims the former, she also adds that “there are no strategies or plans to inform and educate the medical community about ME and the worldwide developments being made in this field”, which begs the question: What service are patients supposedly being given at Mater Dei?

The real situation in Malta is that even when people with ME are lucky enough to be formally diagnosed, they are left to their own devices. They try a myriad of various specialists including neurologists, infectious disease specialists, rheumatologists, gastroenterologist and other physicians in the hope that they will offer some insight and at least help alleviate the specific symptom related to their illness. Trial-and-error medications and treatments are the order of the day, which in most cases are detrimental to the patient’s compromised state of health that in a few, irreparable damage is caused.

We beg the Ministry of Health and the medical school to reconsider their stand and take the necessary steps to rectify this shameful situation by providing appropriate education and training. Health care professionals need to know how to clinically assess and diagnose ME patients at an early stage, based on a consistent set of up-to-date diagnostic criteria, and advise them on appropriate forms of health management.

According to research funded by the ME Association UK (2009), early diagnosis and sympathetic supportive management appear to be the determining factors affecting prognosis in ME, that is, whether or not the patient develops a severe form of the disease. This reality makes keeping up with ongoing biomedical research on ME an even more crucial necessity.

Rebecca Sultana

Nicola Reiss

Beatrice Gatt

ME Sufferers Malta