Sufferers of the debilitating illness ME are inching closer to obtaining the Government support they have long been fighting for as the Health Ministry said it would “seek the way forward” to help them.
“We have to study ways how the ministry supports these patients from a more holistic point of view,” a ministry spokesman said, adding that Health Minister Godfrey Farrugia recently met an ME sufferer to better understand their plight....
In Malta, ME and FM are not recognised as a disability which means that sufferers do not have free access to medication and therapy they may need to live better lives.
ME sufferer Rebecca Sultana, founder of support group ME Sufferers Malta, has long been fighting for this recognition and was glad to hear that the new Government planned to address the matter.
“Our plight has been ignored for the past 12 years. Patients have been ridiculed and left to deteriorate, many live below the bread line and all have heard more rhetoric than they could stomach. I sincerely hope that, unlike others, this government really turns his words into action,” she told The Sunday Times of Malta.
Last year, the Health Ministry said it was assessing the possibility of training local professionals to deliver therapies to focus on treating the illness as a psychological/psychosocial condition.
This sparked outrage among patients who said such statements reflected the lack of proper awareness in the health sector and further accentuated the myth that ME was “all in the head”.
Actor Kevin Drake, also an ME sufferer, stressed it was important that the authorities recognised it as a neuro-immune condition. In 1969, the World Health Organisation defined it as a physical, neurological illness.
