On the occasion of ME Awareness Day 2024:

For the first time, a funeral procession took place in Switzerland on April 6, 2024. What does this have to do with ME Awareness Day?

Then, as now, it was about education and visibility. It's about preparing the ground for the recognition of this disease that makes people disappear.

Botkins was on site with robot Walter Jakob and enabled bedridden sufferers to be there live via telepresence.

It is a mourning process because ME means loss: of health, freedom of movement, independence. And, due to a lack of care, often also basic human rights and dignity. Or even of life.

ME is a physical multi-system disease for which there is no cure and which leads to a high degree of physical disability.

Although ME has been classified as a neurological disease by the WHO since 1969, it is still associated with great stigma today.

Doctors do not recognize it.

Experts do not recognize it.

Society does not see it.

Accordingly, those affected lack everything.

There are no care structures that would do justice to this severe neuroimmunological disease. Neither medically, socially nor financially.

The most severely affected people in particular fall through the cracks of the system and are therefore threatened in their existence.

The silent mourning procession through Zurich was followed by a demonstration and speeches that drew attention to the desolate situation of those affected in Switzerland and their demands:

Care! Research!

Still utopia today. Let's change that!

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Translated with DeepL.com