Our team at The Blue Ribbon Foundation has been busy this summer! Read about the exciting things happening with our website, fellowship, and screenings of Forgotten Plague!
Screenings, new platforms, and ramping up for 2017 fellowships! A busy summer at the Blue Ribbon Foundation!
This week we saw two very notable screenings occur. Center for Disease Control held a screening of Forgotten Plague to an audience of over 50 people on August 3. A huge success for our fight to educate the health and medical profession on ME/CFS! Jennifer McQuinston, Deputy Director for High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology said, "Overall, it was very well received. It is important for us to understand the history of the response to this illness, and to have a better understanding of just how profoundly some ME/CFS patients are affected." CEU Concepts of Atlanta screened Forgotten Plague at Emory University Hospital August 2 during the "Lunch and Learn" to an audience of nurses, social workers and case managers. Before the Q&A began, Mary Prior asked the audience who had ever heard of ME/CFS. Few people raised their hands.
Hopefully by the end of this year, CEU Concepts will be able to offer Forgotten Plague on-line for nursing CEU credit!
We see this as a large crack forming in the ice, and a breakthrough for patient advocacy.
A screening of Forgotten Plague for the CDC was well-attended, with over 50 people in attendance! Our team is thrilled so many were able to watch.
Ryan Prior speaking at the Millions Missing protest in May. Our team plans to attend the second round of protests in September. Watch for more updates on how you can participate!
We are also excited about the updates to our website! In July we launched a "Share your Story"
http://bit.ly/2aN9A6x i.e.
http://theblueribbonfoundation.org/share-your-story/ platform for people in the ME/CFS community to write us to share their experiences.
Our first post came from Ashley Davis
http://bit.ly/2bfdUcO i.e.
http://theblueribbonfoundation.org/2016/07/25/share-your-story-ashley-davis-whitney-dafoe/,
who wrote about the heartache of her brother, Whitney Dafoe, missing her upcoming wedding. From there, submissions quickly grew to include Whitney's mother, Janet Dafoe
http://bit.ly/2aAXDgT i.e.
http://theblueribbonfoundation.org/2016/07/28/share-your-story-janet-dafoe-whitney-dafoe/,
and a heart-wrenching but upbeat post from Jamison Hill
http://bit.ly/2aCTgqi i.e.
http://theblueribbonfoundation.org/2016/07/29/share-your-story-jamison-hill/
he writes, "It’s anything but peachy and I’m a pretty optimistic guy, but I’ve found that hope and love always trump desperation and despair. Luckily I have hope and love through my friends, family and the MECFS community. And in this single moment in time that’s all I need.”
All of the work we at the Blue Ribbon Foundation has one mission in
mind: to foster an international dialogue toward finding the cause, cure, and prevention of neuro-immune diseases. We seek a world in which all medical students are educated about ME/CFS.
We do this through screenings of Forgotten Plague, and the Blue Ribbon Fellowship
http://bit.ly/2aGpzj2 i.e.
http://theblueribbonfoundation.org/blue-ribbon-fellowship/, which pays for medical students between their first and second year of med school to spend it with scientists who are at the forefront of ME/CFS research.
The majority of the work done at the Blue Ribbon Foundation is done voluntarily, and we need help funding the work we do to advocate for patients, either to fund the fellowship or pay employees to help us get programs running. Every little donation we receive is put to meaningful use, to further the education and research done on ME/CFS.
Please donate to further our mission here:
http://theblueribbonfoundation.org/donate/
