Mr. Speaker, Sunday, May 12 is national ME/FM awareness day.
Imagine overnight changing from a vital, healthy, active person to someone who lacks enough strength to get out of bed.
I refer to Canadians suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and its related illness, fibromyalgia, real and severe diseases which impair their victims and their ability to work.
CFS can take a perfectly healthy person and create a totally dysfunctional individual. Young people are frequent victims; lost jobs, depression and sometimes suicide are often the effects.
Yet Canada has no federal policy framework in place to ensure care and treatment for thousands of these individuals, nor does the federal government undertake to fund laboratory research and control.
The medical professionals must take a more proactive role in diagnosis. The public must be better informed. Health Canada must beef up its research. There are 100,000 affected Canadians who need recognition of these diseases. Petitions bearing 15,000 signatures from all across Canada showing this illness has touched many will be presented in the House today.
In Ottawa this weekend MESH Ottawa will hold a health fair, and in Regina members of the medical profession supportive of CFS sufferers were honoured on May 8.