Every purchase of Vegepa or Echiomega made through The Scheme
donates vital funding for the
ME Association's Ramsay Research Fund

The Ramsay Research Fund is the research arm of The ME Association, Britain's oldest patient support group for people with ME/CFS. It's looking for treatments and hopefully a cure for an illness that devastates the lives of almost a quarter of a million people in the UK.

No one quite knows why previously fit and health children and adults are struck down by M.E. – but the effects can devastate young lives and turn the lives of their families upside down.

What we do know is that in many cases a viral infection, or repeated infections, can act as the main trigger factor. The body's immune system doesn't then deal with the infection in its usually effective way – causing problems with the brain, nervous system and muscles.

The body of an M.E. sufferers can be wracked with flu-like symptoms for years. Weeks or months after the infection has gone, sufferers are often still totally physically exhausted as if they are functioning at well below 50% of their normal levels.

The ME Association's research fund – known as the Ramsay Research Fund, after a doctor who first got involved with M.E. patients over 50 years ago – has become part of an international effort to find the root causes for the illness. It's looking for treatments. And it so much wants to find a cure.

In recent years, the Ramsay Research Fund has switched its attention to genetic research, where some of the answers probably lie. At the moment, it's paying for an important separate study into why the muscles of M.E. sufferers don't seem to work in the same way as those in healthy people.

And – providing the money comes in – it hopes shortly to set up the UK's first specialist biobank so that researchers have plenty of tissue to examine and magnify to find out exactly what makes it so different from tissue in other people's bodies.

We're looking for the breakthroughs that will help many of the 240,000 people with ME/CFS in the UK back to normal health, back to school and back into work so that, once again, they can become the normal functioning members of society they so much want to be.

For further information go to The ME Association

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