Evidently I forgot to include the limitations of my ability to use a calculator when I'm tired! Sorry for adding an extra zero. Although yet again, it's a warning about what can happen when trusting statistics, errors can creep in and get embedded.
Somewhere else on this site there is a figure that says that average age at death with ME is 55, but it's probably as controversial as the 250,000 sufferers or 3% death rate - actually, it really doesn't mesh well with the 3% death rate, does it. The fact is that no one has a clue, and I don't think anyone is really going to have a good idea of what ME truly does to life expectancy for decades, not until there has been a lot of really good research, and in particular a better method of diagnosis leading to a more accurate ability to work out how many people are affected with ME at all.
Whatever the numbers are, even if we take 250 a year as a wild guess, and multiply that by however many years it's been since the first ME death that was reported in the media (if that's Sophia Mirza, just over 6 years), and then only three of those that we know of, that's still the vast majority of people dying from ME going completely unmentioned. More than enough to cloud the figures.
And then we get back to the politics of how someone's death is recorded when they have a condition that tends to cause death through an intermediate condition (e.g. top causes of death with ME, again pulled from a possibly-incorrect stat from somewhere on this site, are cancer, suicide and heart disease). I refer you again to the under-recording of AIDS deaths, which is discussed
here and
here. Considering that this is still very bad after decades, and that there is a higher incentive to record AIDS deaths accurately as it is alarmingly transmissible and has a much higher death rate than ME, and also that in it is easier to diagnose and in some ways less stigmatised than ME, I think it is going to be a very long time before we have solid information about the prevalence of severe ME and deaths from ME.