ABOUT OUR WORK
There is comfort in knowledge. For those who suffer from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), there is comfort in knowing that good minds are working on this life-confiscating disease: a disease hidden in plain sight.
There is comfort, too, in knowing that you are not alone.
ME/CFS Alert was launched in June 2011 by Llewellyn King, a print and broadcast journalist, and Deborah Waroff, a Wall Street analyst until she was felled by ME/CFS. They had known each other 30 years earlier but had not been in touch. Llewellyn learned that Deborah, once a squash player, skier and cyclist, had been incapacitated by the disease for 20 years, struck down in her prime.
When Llewellyn wrote a newspaper column about ME/CFS, he was overwhelmed with letters, wonderful, heart-rending letters from people around the world, thanking him for recognizing their suffering. He wrote more columns and received more letters of thanks. He spoke to Deborah and together they launched the groundbreaking ME/CFS Alert on YouTube. It was designed “to comfort the sick, educate the doctors and to shame the government” into conducting more research. Since its launch, more than 100 episodes – interviews with medical researchers, doctors, advocates, patients, and caregivers -- have been uploaded to the channel.
This website is designed to put years of work in one place, making it easier for the ME/CFS community to find the videos, writing and other information.
WATCH THE VIDEOS
SUPPORT OUR MISSION
Our mission is to comfort the sick, educate the doctors, and persuade the government through
video interviews with patients, doctors, medical researchers, and advocates.
You can keep this work going by contributing here:
ABOUT THE TEAM
Llewellyn King
Llewellyn King is the executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle,” a weekly news and public affairs program which airs on PBS and other broadcast outlets. He created the program in 1997. He writes a weekly column which is distributed by the InsideSources syndicate to 500 newspapers. Previously, his column was distributed by the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate and Knight-Ridder Newspapers. In 2006, University Press of America published a collection of his columns entitled “Washington and The World 2001-2005.” The columns appeared mainly in Knight-Ridder newspapers, including the Miami Herald, the Sacramento Bee, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Kansas City Star, the Charlotte Observer and the Columbus Dispatch.
He was the founder and editor in chief of The Energy Daily. The Washington, D.C.-based newsletter was the flagship of his award-winning King Publishing Group which he sold in 2006. The group's other titles included Defense Week, New Technology Week, and Navy News & Undersea Technology. His insightful reporting and analysis of the energy industry led to his being an author for a plan on which President Richard Nixon based his national energy policy in 1973. It also led to frequent guest spots on network news programs, including NBC's “Meet the Press,” PBS's “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” CNN and C-SPAN. Over the years, he has given hundreds of keynote speeches on energy and innovation to corporations, including Westinghouse, General Electric and Deutsche Bank, and U.S. and international organizations, including the Edison Electric Institute, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the World Energy Forum, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In November 2018, he was the keynote speaker at NASA’s annual Cross-Industry Innovation Summit, an annual, by-invitation-only event held at Space Center Houston.
He has lectured at universities throughout the country, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Brown and Penn State University’s Dickinson Law School. And he is one of the few journalists who has ever been invited to lecture an elite group of scientists, known as “The Mod Squad,” at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
His remarkable career in journalism began in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where he was hired at age 16 as a foreign correspondent for Time magazine. He also reported from Africa for London's Daily Express and News Chronicle, and United Press. Moving to London in 1959, he worked as an executive for The Daily Mirror Group, a reporter for Associated Newspapers, and a news writer for BBC and ITN. After moving to the United States in the 1960s, he worked as an editor and reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, the Baltimore News-American, the Washington Daily News and the Washington Post. A stint at McGraw-Hill's Nucleonics Week led to his founding The Energy Daily in 1973, before the energy crisis broke out. It was not his first trailblazing publication: In the 1960s, he founded Women Now, a monthly magazine targeted to emerging professional women. “Women Now did not liberate any women, but it liberated all my money,” he quips. Before creating “White House Chronicle,” he and journalist Linda Gasparello co-hosted “The Bull and The Bear,” a daily stock market program which aired on the GoodLife and Jones Intercable cable television systems in the mid-1990s.
In 2011, he created ME/CFS Alert, a groundbreaking YouTube channel on Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). He and Deborah Waroff, his co-host on the channel and inspiration for it, intended for their video interviews of patients, physicians, medical researchers, advocates and caregivers “to comfort the sick, to educate the doctors, and to shame the government.” The videos have had thousands of views and grateful responses. In 2013, he started a GoFundMe campaign for ME/CFS Alert on YouTube.
He is an erudite commentator on a wide variety of subjects, including aviation and transportation; energy and engineering; innovations in science and technology; Congress. the White House, federal departments and agencies; politics; the media and journalism; publishing; small business; unions and the future of work. He has organized more than 1,000 conferences on subjects, including nuclear energy, landmine removal, Iraq reconstruction, protecting Social Security, and campaign finance reform. For his longtime contribution to the understanding of science and technology, he was awarded an honorary DEng (Doctor of Engineering) from The Stevens Institute of Technology. In 2014, the United States Energy Association presented him with its United States Energy Award. He is the only journalist to have received this prestigious award.
About “White House Chronicle”:
“White House Chronicle” airs nationwide on more than 200 PBS and public, educational and government (PEG) cable access television stations. The program airs worldwide on Voice of America Television and Radio in English and Chinese. The program’s creator, executive producer and host is syndicated columnist Llewellyn King; its producer and co-host is journalist Linda Gasparello. An audio version of the program airs four times weekends on SiriusXM Radio's P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), Channel 124. The program is on Spotify, PocketCasts and other podcasting platforms.
Deborah Waroff
Deborah Waroff is the co-host of ME/CFS Alert. She got a bachelor's degree with honors in architectural sciences from Harvard College and an MBA degree with honors in finance and international business from New York University. She is a retired Wall Street energy analyst and an advocate for better treatments and increased government funding for ME/CFS.
In July 1989, she became sick with ME/CFS, following a flu-like illness. She has had several partial remissions and relapses. One partial remission was for nine months, following a round of tetracycline in 1990. Another partial remission was from 1992 to 2003, which she credits to a combination of pharmaceuticals, including amantadine, thyroid hormones, Pemoline, and Wellbutrin. In September 2003, she relapsed to being bedbound. In 2005, she started IV ozone treatments which would improve her health, but every time she stopped, she would relapse. She has urged the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to investigate IV ozone therapy.