A Syndrome in Search of a Virus: ME/CFS, Disease Paradigms, and the Social Function of Pathogens (2024)
Emily Lim Rogers (Author)
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 39
Pages: 280-297
In 1984, a team of American researchers led by Robert Gallo announced that HIV causes AIDS. Seven months later, the US Centers for Disease Control investigated a postviral illness of unknown cause, which would later be known as chronic fatigue syndrome (aka myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME/CFS). This article argues that ME/CFS’s emergence was entangled with HIV/AIDS. Once the cause of AIDS was widely agreed upon by the 1990s, the virus-to-syndrome model became the predominant paradigm for understanding syndromic diseases of as-yet unknown cause. At the same time, ME/CFS—a multicausal illness—failed to fit this template, and societal disinterest fell in. Scientific uncertainty sustains the status of ME/CFS as proximate to, but not fully accepted as, bona fide “disease.” This has implications for the history of disability and the history of medicine, as ME/CFS sits uneasily between these bodies of knowledge, demonstrating the thorny and socially overdetermined process of medicalization.
...MoreArticle Mara Mills; Jaipreet Virdi; Sarah F. Rose (2024) Disability, Epistemology, Sciencing. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-24).
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