I really feel for the moms here.
In the UK, women who develop CFS during a pregnany are banned from donating the umbilical cord. This is a sensible precaution, but one rarely advertise as it doesn't fit in with the mind-body theory of what 'maintains' CFS symptoms after the infection has 'gone'. (E.g the patients mind said to be defective and in need of CBT/GET).
Not only is this ban on umbilical cord material of CFS mothers a masked admission the mother is presumed infected, it also (by default) means the newborn is presumed infected also. (Closing the barn door after the horse had bolted).
I imagine the truth, is rather more complicated, but this does't stop women being victims of people wth an agenda.
From the few women I've spoken to who have CFS and children with ME CFS or autism many report a miscarriage. This is interesting medically (aside from tragic) because inflammatory processes can leads to instability in the placenta and not uncommonly this can be due to Borrelia infection. I took that on board back then, as now, an increasing percentage of people with a diagnosis of ME or CFS, and finding out decades later that not only they have Lyme (the patients) but the moms and even dads have Lyme too, including healthy family members never bitten by a tick.
Over the next few years I think this is going to get quite heated, if a ground breaking diagnostic test can be developed that is not only accurate, but is cost effective and can look for multiple strains at a time (lab on a chip perhaps).
Perhaps then, we will discover and be able to have more answers of parent to child transmission of 'CFS'. As someone who's mom has CFS and now the dad is sick too, I want answers and I also want answers for women too, who I fear, have be sold down the river as usual for the purpose of not telling the public until a treatment has been created. (If one ever exists).
I want to see what the Nevada Centre for Biologial Research (new name for Whittemore Peterson Instiute) finds, now they are going to start looking for links between MS, Autism, FMS, and CFS, rather than research CFS in isolation. It would seem a future discovery of a shared pathogen, or shared autoimmunity is more than possible (with differing disease expression) and if so, I would not be surprised to learn the common denominator is Borrelia affecting whole families who carry certain genes, and in these people the infection is not only passed on the children, but is pathogenic (disease causing).
As someone who's own life has been ruined and will never be able to have children myself, I want answers and I want them urgently.
If 'CFS' subsets are found to be linked to a sexually transmitted pathogen (in genetically susceptible people), I would imagine many will be asking questions, why the British banned blood/umbilical cord/bone marrow as a precaution, but America didn't.
