ME/CFS BREAKING NEWS: From 1991...

A new serial republishes one of the first books to investigate ME/CFS

Beginning this week, I am republishing my first book on ME/CFS, What Really Killed Gilda Radner? Frontline Reports on the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic, as a serial on SubStack. Published in 1991, it is essentially out of print 32 years later.

Why resurrect such an old book about an emerging disease? Sadly, very little has changed for patients since I began covering Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, as it was then named, in the weekly New York Native in early 1988. The Incline Village outbreak had happened only four years before, which in medical research terms is essentially yesterday. Patients, physicians and researchers were equally puzzled and frustrated; the media ridiculed patients with descriptions like “Yuppie Flu,” “Raggedy Ann Syndrome,” and “a fashionable form of hypochondria.”

As I spoke to more and more patients three decades ago, I was touched by the depth of their desperation and enraged at the treatment they were receiving from the medical profession, research establishment, media, and even their own friends and families.

That rage has endured 35 years.

Why was the book named What Really Killed Gilda Radner? The beloved comedienne died from ovarian cancer in 1989, three years after having been diagnosed with “Chronic Epstein-Barr Virus Syndrome” as she described in her autobiography, It’s Always Something. She encountered the Catch-22 that torments ME/CFS patients to this day: If an ME/CFS patient develops cancer, he or she is relabeled as a cancer patient. Therefore, ME/CFS patients never develop cancer.

Three decades later, given medical research that has clarified (to a certain extent) the syndrome’s immune, neurologic and gastrointestinal dysfunction, the book is being renamed The Other AIDS Epidemic: Frontline Reports on the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and HHV-6 Epidemics, 1988-1991. Although the name “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” is universally disliked, it was the official name of the illness at the time. In one of the first attempts to change the name to one that took the syndrome’s immune dysfunction more seriously, my editors and I coined the term “Chronic Immune Dysfunction Syndrome” or “CIDS,” which is also used throughout the book. That attempt to create a more descriptive name failed, as have many others.

The book also reflects the scientific findings and opinions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The chapters therefore go down some dead-end roads and include now-discarded theories but will hopefully be instructive about how we got to where we are today.

Why republish at all? The 32-year-old book’s original interviews and investigations, I believe, provide insight to the long, sad, infuriating history of ME/CFS.

The passage of more than three decades also means that central figures in this story are no longer with us. Incline Village physician Paul R. Cheney, MD, Ph.D., passed away June 10, 2021. NIAID Director and first NIH point person on the epidemic, Stephen E. Straus, MD, passed away May 14, 2007. Other individuals quoted and profiled may also no longer be living. This book will represent them as they were at the time, for good or ill.

The Introduction and first two chapters will be available on SubStack for everyone; thereafter, the serialized chapters will be available only to paid subscribers. There will also be breaking news and research reports available to all subscribers as events allow; I am hopeful that there will be enough ME/CFS news for weekly reports.

For anyone who has not yet read Hillary Johnson’s Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic, I can’t recommend it strongly enough, along with her new work, The Why: The Historic ME/CFS Call to Arms.

Now, let’s take a new look at the early events that damaged, helped, defined, and stigmatized the very first patients with ME/CFS.

The Other AIDS Epidemic:
Frontline Reports on the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
and HHV-6 Epidemics, 1988-1991

Original 1990 Introduction

Why is this book titled What Really Killed Gilda Radner?

Why is this book titled What Really Killed Gilda Radner? Because, over two-and-one-half years of investigating and reporting the story you are about to read, I became convinced that governmental health agencies have done everything in their power to ignore, suppress, and even actively cover up the fact that there is a new epidemic sweeping the United States: an epidemic of immune deficiency similar to AIDS that claimed Gilda Radner as one of its first fatalities. The illness is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. A considerable body of evidence suggests that it is a highly contagious disease that produces profound damage to the immune system’s ability to perform. It can result in cancer, and death.

Comedienne Gilda Radner was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in June 1986—at that time it was called “Chronic Epstein Barr Virus Syndrome”—approximately a year and a half before she developed the ovarian cancer that killed her in May 1989, according to the chronology she presented in her book, It’s Always Something. (1)

By May 1988—one year before Radner’s death—the government researcher in charge of investigating the new illness had received information suggesting that people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome were unusually prone to developing cancer. The government’s first point man on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Dr. Gary Holmes at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, was informed in May 1988 that an unexpectedly high number of patients involved in the first documented outbreak of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome had developed lymphomas.

Did Holmes rush to the scene to investigate? Did he advise Congress that there might be an outbreak of contagious cancer? Did he even request to see the patients’ case histories?

No. Holmes dismissed the findings without even a cursory investigation. In a very condescending letter to the local doctor who had informed him of the cancers, Holmes explained the government’s circular argument: If a patient develops cancer, that moves him/her from the category of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patient to the category of cancer patient. Never mind that it appeared that a disturbingly high percentage of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients were, like Radner, developing cancer: After they developed cancer, they were no longer considered to be Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients. Therefore, by Holmes’s reasoning, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients never developed cancer.

Another report of cancer among  patients was made public in summer 1988: At a conference on June 15, Dr. Ronald Herberman (from the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute) and his coworkers presented findings from their study of an outbreak of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the local symphony orchestra. Among the 67 people studied between 1984 and 1987, four developed cancer; these researchers concluded, in a published abstract of their conference presentation, that there is a remarkably increased cancer risk in people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

To date, no governmental agency has addressed—or even admitted—the possibility that people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome could be at higher risk for developing cancer than the general population.

The fact that government health authorities have ignored these potentially explosive findings is typical of the bureaucratic bumbling that has plagued the patients and physicians who are trying to understand and treat this devastating new illness. As you will see, a pattern of ineptitude has characterized the government’s handling of this epidemic from the very beginning.

The first recognized outbreak of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome began in autumn 1984 in Incline Village, Nevada. Two general practitioners, Dr. Paul Cheney and his partner Dr. Daniel Peterson (the physician who later informed Holmes about the lymphomas), noticed that an unusually high percentage of their patients were sick with a flu that didn’t seem to go away.

The two physicians had worked in the community for several years; they recognized that something new was affecting their usually stable patient population. Their patients had flu-like symptoms: recurrent fevers, malaise, headaches, sore throats, painful lymph glands, joint pain, muscle pain and weakness. They also exhibited some disturbing neurological symptoms like dizziness, photophobia (intolerance of light), and inability to concentrate well enough to read or even watch television, as well as short-term memory loss. Most disturbing of all, however, was that the symptoms showed no sign of disappearing over a period of several weeks to months.

Cheney and Peterson noticed that many of these patients had high levels of antibodies to a virus that is common but can cause mononucleosis (the “kissing disease” of teenagers) and certain types of cancers, the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). The two physicians thought EBV might be causing their patients’ mysterious lingering flu. So, in the spring of 1985, they called in the nation’s experts on epidemics, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The CDC sent Holmes to investigate. Holmes talked with patients, drew blood samples, and went back to Atlanta to perform his analysis. He concluded that there was no EBV-related epidemic in a scientific paper he published more than two years later. But behind the scenes, as documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal, something shady was going on. Holmes invited Cheney to be a coauthor on the CDC’s scientific paper describing the investigation and sent him an advanced copy in February 1987. (2)

What Cheney read in this paper so horrified him that not only did he refuse to coauthor the paper describing the outbreak he himself had helped to identify, he wrote a protesting letter to the editor of the scientific journal in which the paper was to appear. The data presented in the paper had been completely distorted from the original data gathered, Cheney charged; he questioned the ethics of the journal in publishing such a distorted report.

“I cannot help but conclude that Dr. Holmes et al. have altered their own data to suit their particular purposes... Their article has, in its current form, no business being published in a major medical journal,” Cheney wrote.

In spite of the evidence of data-tampering that Cheney presented, the small-town physician didn’t have a prayer of winning such an argument with the government researcher; the paper was published as Holmes had constructed it. (2)

In subsequent interviews with the press, Holmes portrayed Cheney and Peterson as enthusiastic incompetents. In July 1987, Holmes told the health magazine Hippocrates, referring to Cheney and Peterson, “Physicians get caught up. They think they notice something then they start seeing it everywhere.” (3)

In part because of Holmes’s skewing of the data from the original outbreak of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to make it appear less conclusive than it was, an official “case definition” was not published by the CDC until March 1988. The case definition—of which Holmes was the lead author—gave physicians guidelines for diagnosing the new illness. (4)

These CDC guidelines remain a point of contention almost three years later because they describe a “diagnosis of exclusion”; that is, the physician is to test for every one of a long list of illnesses. If none of those time-consuming—and expensive—tests comes back positive, and the patient continues to have a defined set of symptoms for longer than six months, a provisional diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can be assigned.

Meanwhile, the government’s other Chronic Fatigue Syndrome expert, Dr. Stephen Straus at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, seemed intent upon proving that the syndrome is a “psychoneurotic” illness caused by depression or another psychological disorder. In a scientific paper published the same month as the CDC case definition, Straus wrote that “Ultimately, any hypothesis regarding the cause of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome must incorporate the psychopathology that accompanies and, in some cases, precedes it.” (5)

While government scientists created confusion about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, private sector researchers were discovering evidence that, not only had Cheney and Peterson discovered a real syndrome, it might already have reached epidemic proportions in the American population by the time it was detected.

In 1987, Dr. Anthony Komaroff, at the prestigious Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston (affiliated with the Harvard Medical School), conducted a survey of 500 patients seeking treatment in a general clinic. To his surprise, Komaroff found that a staggering 21% of patients attending the clinic for other reasons reported experiencing symptoms of the new syndrome. Komaroff published this astonishing discovery; nothing happened. (6)

A 1987 report by Japanese scientists, which may have defined both a laboratory marker and an effective treatment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, was also ignored by US health authorities. A research team led by Dr. Tadao Aoki, along with the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute’s Herberman, characterized an illness they called “Low Natural Killer Syndrome” (LNKS). Natural killer (NK) cells are a type of immune system cell. The major symptoms of the illness were described as remittent fever and exhaustion that persists without explanation for more than six months. They found an objectively measured laboratory abnormality in these patients: lowered natural killer cell activity. And they found an effective treatment: intravenously administered lentinan, an extract of shiitake mushrooms that has been investigated as an antitumor, antiviral, and immune system-stimulating compound since 1969. (7)

US government scientists, however, continue to assert that there is no “objective laboratory marker” for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—even though Herberman and others have since duplicated the finding that natural killer cell activity is decreased, not only in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients, but also in their close, non-sexual contacts.

What could cause a new illness to spread through the population so rapidly as Komaroff’s survey indicated? By early 1987, EBV had been abandoned as a possible cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Cheney, however, has described EBV’s significance in the syndrome as a “sentinel” of the immune system: if EBV is allowed to replicate out of control—causing the increase in antibodies to EBV found in people with the syndrome—that is a signal that something is seriously wrong with the immune system.

Meanwhile, as Cheney and Peterson struggled to convince health authorities to acknowledge the new illness, developments in AIDS research ultimately had implications for solving the mystery of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

On August 3, 1986, a page-one story in the New York Times announced that the Army researcher Dr. Shi-Ching Lo had isolated a “virus-like infectious agent” from people with AIDS. After the news broke on the front page of the Times, however, the Army became edgy about receiving publicity about the new agent and forbade Lo to give any more interviews to the press. Since no investigative reporter made any serious attempt to find out more about the agent, the story sank into obscurity in the mainstream media. Lo continued research on this “virus-like infectious agent,” VLIA for short, and its role as a disease-causing entity for more than two years without publishing any further reports.

In the October 1986 issue of Science magazine, researchers from the laboratory of Dr. Robert C. Gallo at the National Cancer Institute announced that they had isolated a large DNA virus from people with AIDS and certain cancers of the immune system. (8)

DNA is a chemical made up of nucleic acids; it is the genetic material found in all cellular organisms, as well as in DNA viruses. RNA is a sister molecule to DNA, in that it’s comprised of slightly different nucleic acids. DNA genes are often used as templates, or patterns, for RNA, which can then be used to create proteins and other cellular molecules.

Unlike most viruses that cause human illnesses, which are composed of DNA, the AIDS virus—the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV—is a retrovirus, which means that it’s made up of RNA instead of DNA.

Gallo has claimed credit as co-discoverer of HIV. In November 1990, however, the National Institutes of Health launched a formal investigation into possible scientific misconduct in Gallo’s laboratory during the time he claims to have discovered the AIDS virus. This investigation of possible scientific misconduct has damaged the credibility of Gallo’s research on both AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

The new DNA virus isolated in Gallo’s laboratory was named Human B-lymphotropic Virus (HBLV), because it was thought to infect and kill only the antibody-producing B-cells of the immune system. Later studies, however, showed the virus capable of infecting a wide range of immune system cells; its name was subsequently changed to Human Herpes Virus type 6 (HHV-6). (8)

In the same issue of Science that announced HBLV’s discovery, the virus was suggested as a possible cause of the new “mystery illness” in Incline Village.

The discovery of both a new, large, DNA virus and a new, large virus-like infectious agent in people with AIDS reminded some researchers of observations made in 1983 by Dr. Jane Teas at the Harvard School of Public Health. In April 1983, Teas published a scientific report comparing the new syndrome AIDS to an old viral illness of swine: African Swine Fever. The two illnesses had in common fever, loss of appetite, swollen lymph nodes, hyperplasia of the lymphatic system (in swine), and high levels of antibodies in the bloodstream. Teas also noticed that the similarities in “geography symptoms, and timing between Haitian ASFV [African swine fever virus] and AIDS are striking and deserve further investigation.” (9) (It should also be noted that ASFV has been confused with human herpes viruses in the past.)

Although Teas and colleagues later found evidence of infection with ASFV in people with AIDS—using material supplied to them from the US Department of Agriculture—and published these results in 1986, the scientific establishment ignored the finding, despite the fact that swine are a natural reservoir for human illnesses like influenza. (10)

It is still eminently possible that Gallo’s HBLV/HHV-6 is actually a renamed ASFV. It would be, politically, a very explosive issue if it turns out that people are getting Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from animals. But then, just about everything one finds out about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is potentially explosive.

Over the course of 1989, Lo and coworkers published a series of papers further characterizing their virus-like infectious agent, VLIA. They reported first that it could infect monkeys and cause an illness of transient fever, lymph node disease, unexplained weight loss, and symptoms suggestive of neurological dysfunction. The four monkeys experimentally infected all died within six to nine months of infection; no infectious agent other than VLIA was found in the monkeys after death. (11)

Lo subsequently reported that VLIA had been found to infect and kill six previously healthy, non-AIDS patients who died within 7-9 weeks. (12)

And in late 1989, the Army researchers announced that their “virus-like infectious agent” was actually a unique type of the family of bacteria called mycoplasma. They named the agent Mycoplasma incognito, because of its ability to elude detection by the immune system.

Is this bacterium also found in people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? While that question is still being investigated, Lo has said that he has found “indications” of infection by M. incognitus in the blood of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients. Anecdotally, some patients report that the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are ameliorated when they take high doses of anti-mycoplasma antibiotics, such as tetracycline or doxycycline.

Then there are those who suspected that, like the conventional wisdom about AIDS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by a retrovirus.

In early September 1990, Cheney and two other scientists announced at a conference in Japan that they had found evidence of infection with a retrovirus—an RNA virus like the AIDS virus—in people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The significance of this finding, as Cheney and coworkers agree, is not yet known.

And so, a retrovirus has entered the potpourri of infectious agents suggested at one time or another as possible causes of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: EBV, HHV-6, enteroviruses (intestinal viruses), cytomegalovirus, and mycoplasma. So many of these agents infect both people with AIDS and people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that, for this reason and others, Cheney referred to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1989 Congressional testimony as an “epiphenomenon of AIDS.”

These facts raise a very disturbing question that many researchers are afraid to ask. Are Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and AIDS different points on a continuum of immune dysfunction? Are they ultimately caused by the same virus? And is it possible that the cause is not HIV, or any other retrovirus, but rather a DNA virus or even a bacterium?

A rather frightening development which most of the mainstream press is ignoring is that the diagnosis of AIDS itself appears to be unraveling as cases of AIDS without the AIDS virus and cases of infection with the AIDS virus without illness continue to appear. The diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which was called “an acquired immunodeficiency” in a 1990 research report, appears increasingly to be a diagnosis of immune incompetence.

The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome story is one that is byzantine, occasionally confusing, and ultimately a tragedy for millions of people affected by this illness. A major question that remains to be answered is: Why have federal health officials been so slow to respond to the emergence of an infectious illness that may affect as many as one-fifth of the population?

Since 1986, according to documents received under the Freedom of Information Act, Congress has directed the CDC to establish a “reporting protocol” for the illness to determine how many people are affected. It was not until late 1989, however, that CDC began a “surveillance protocol”—not what Congress requested—that will not be completed until 1992. Meanwhile,  Chronic Fatigue Syndrome researchers uneasily point out that the incidence of the syndrome appears, anecdotally, to be increasing at an astonishing rate of speed.

Why, until late 1989, was the CDC circumventing the will of Congress?

And, had government health officials—including former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who was advised of the extent of the epidemic in the Armed Services in the spring of 1987—acted promptly on all the information available in the scientific literature, might Gilda Radner still be alive?

For whatever reasons—reluctance to admit the presence of an AIDS-like epidemic sweeping the nation that’s linked to the official AIDS epidemic, simple incompetence, or more sinister reasons—health authorities have tried to deny the very existence of the  epidemic in the US, tried to prove an illness of immune dysfunction is caused by “psychoneurosis,” delayed determining how many cases actually exist and forged a definition that makes diagnosis exceptionally difficult and expensive. They’ve succeeded brilliantly in creating confusion among physicians, researchers, politicians and the public.

Against this backdrop of bureaucratic ineptitude, general lack of concern for patients, and possible scientific misjudgment and misconduct, my publisher and I decided to add yet another name to the mélange surrounding this illness. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is, at the very least, inadequately descriptive and trivializing of this complex illness of immune system and neurological dysfunction. Throughout this text the illness is referred to as CIDS—Chronic Immune Dysfunction Syndrome. This name reflects the fact that the illness is primarily one of chronic immune dysfunction and seems the most appropriate name to use at this time.

What follows is a collection of newspaper articles about CIDS published in the New York Native from 1988 to 1991. Presented here in chronological order, they report on various aspects of CIDS: symptoms, treatments, possible causes, and personal odysseys that describe the experience of having an illness scientists don’t understand, physicians don’t know how to treat, and the general public dismisses as malingering.

The personal tragedies of people with CIDS are staggering—marriages dissolve, careers and livelihoods are wrecked, insurance coverage discontinued, and disability benefits almost impossible to obtain.

Many CIDS patients to whom I have spoken have attempted suicide; many others have contemplated it. A few courageous individuals have told their stories in these pages.

But for every person brave enough, and angry enough, to talk on the record, there are many more who are terrified that their identities will be uncovered, their illness revealed, and their carefully constructed lives threatened by job loss or stigmatization. Some patients, while feeling strongly that they must communicate with me, refuse to reveal even confidentially their names, careers, or geographical locations.

Such personal terror and tragedy will end only when the mysteries of CIDS are understood. This crippling illness must be socially recognized, scientifically dissected, and effectively treated—before it cripples the nation.

What really killed Gilda Radner? Was it really the incompetence—or worse—of government health officials determined to ignore data showing that CIDS could progress to cancer? Had Radner been treated with the lentinan that the Japanese found restores natural killer cell activity—one of the body’s natural defenses against cancer—might she be alive today?

This volume attempts to answer those questions, and many more.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Gilda Radner; It’s Always Something: 20^th Anniversary Edition; Simon & Schuster (New York, NY); 2009.
2. Gary P. Holmes et al.; “A Cluster of Patients with a Chronic Mononucleosis-like Syndrome: Is Epstein-Barr Virus the Cause?”; Journal of the American Medical Association, 1987, 254:2297.
3. William Boly; “The Raggedy Ann Syndrome”; Hippocrates, July/August 1987, 31.
4. Gary P. Holmes et al.; “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Working Case Definition”; Annals of Internal Medicine, 1988, 109:387.
5. Stephen E. Straus; “The Chronic Mononucleosis Syndrome”; Journal of Infectious Diseases, 1988; 157:405.
6. A. Komaroff et al.; “A Chronic ‘Post-Viral’ Fatigue Syndrome With Neurologic Features: Serologic Association with Human Herpes Virus 6”; Abstracts from the Society of General Internal Medicine, April 27-29, 1988.
7. Tadao Aoki et al.; “Low Natural Killer Syndrome: Clinical and Immunological Features”; Natural Immunity and Cell Growth Regulation, 1987, 6:116.
8. S.Z. Salahuddin, D.V. Ablashi, P.D. Markham, et al. “Isolation of a New Virus, HBLV, in Patients With Lymphoproliferative Disorders”; Science, 234 (1986), pp. 596-601.
9. Jane Teas; “Could AIDS Agent Be a New Variant of African Swine Fever Virus?”; The Lancet, April 23, 1983.
10. Jane Teas, John Beldekas, and James R. Hebert; “African Swine Fever and AIDS”; The Lancet, March 8, 1986.
11. Shyh C. Lo et al.; “A Newly Identified Infectious Agent Derived From a Patient With AIDS”; Presented at the 4^th International Conference on AIDS, June 12-16, 1988, Stockholm, Sweden.
12. Shyh C. Lo. et al.; “Fatal Infection of Non-human Primates With the Virus-like Infectious Agent (VLIA-sb51) Derived From a Patient With AIDS”; Presented at the 4^th International Conference on AIDS, June 12-16, 1988, Stockholm, Sweden.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Neenyah Ostrom was the first reporter in the United States to report weekly for a decade on ME/CFS. Her reporting on the Chronic Fatigue Syn­drome epidemic from 1988-1997 is getting increased atten­tion thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He discusses her work exten­sively in his 2022 best seller, The Real Anthony Fauci. Ostrom’s groundbreaking reporting on Chronic Fatigue Syn­drome and AIDS appeared in the New York Native from 1988 to 1997.

Ostrom wrote the Foreword to the recently published THE REAL AIDS EPIDEMIC: How the Tragic HIV Mistake Threatens Us All by Rebecca Culshaw, Ph.D.

Ostrom is the author of four books about the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome epidemic: What Really Killed Gilda Radner? Frontline Reports On The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic (1991; TNM Inc., New York, NY), 50 Things Everyone Should Know About The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic And Its Link To AIDS (1992; TNM Inc. and St. Martin’s Press, New York, NY; published in Japanese by Shindan-to-Chiryo, 1993; and in French by Les Edi­tions Logiques, 1994), and America’s Biggest Cover-Up: 50 More Things Everyone Should Know About The Chronic Fatigue Syn­drome Epidemic And Its Link To AIDS (1993; TNM Inc., New York, NY); and America’s Biggest Cover-Up: 50 More Things Everyone Should Know About The Chronic Fatigue Syn­drome Epidemic And Its Link To AIDS, Updated 2^nd Edition(2022, available as a Kindle ebook and paperback on Amazon.com). Her most recent book, Ampligen: The Battle for a Promising ME/CFS Drug (2022) is available as a Kindle ebook and paperback on Amazon.com

 In 1995, Ostrom and New York Native were rec­ognized as having reported one of the top 25 most-censored stories in the U.S. press by 1995’s Censored: The News That Didn’t Make The News And Why (The 1995 Project Censored Yearbook by Sonoma State University Professor Carl Jensen, introduction by Michael Crichton; pub­lished by Four Walls Eight Win­dows, New York, NY, 1995).

Ostrom is ghostwriter/editor of seven popular science books. Additionally, she was an editor of Total Breast Health: The Power Food Solution For Health And Wellness by Robin Keuneke, which was chosen as a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 1998” in the category of Breast Health (Kensing­ton Publishing Corp., April 1998).