NEMSN Medical Advisory Panel
Edward Belongia, M.D.
Gerald J. Gleich, M.D.
Kim Sing Lo, D.O.
Stephen Naylor, Ph.D.
Edward Belongia, M.D. is Director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology & Population Health at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation in Marshfield, Wisconsin. According to the center's website, "Epidemiology research focuses on population health issues. The Marshfield Epidemiology Research Center emphasizes consequential epidemiology – applied research that has a positive effect on public health and disease prevention." Dr. Belongia's current research focuses on influenza, other respiratory viruses, and vaccine preventable diseases, as well as on studies to assess the immune response to influenza vaccination in children and the effects of repeated vaccination. In 2004 Dr. Belongia received a $1 million award from the Centers for Disease Control for a study of influenza vaccine effectiveness. Previous research areas have included antimicrobial resistance and appropriate antibiotic use, foodborne disease epidemiology, and tickborne disease epidemiology.
NEMSN vice-president Jinx Engstrom writes of Dr. Belongia's early work with EMS patients as follows: "He was an epidemiologist here in Minnesota when the initial outbreak happened in 1989. He was a huge help in determining what was making so many people sick. Then after it was determined, he was generous to our support group. When he was presenting information at the University of Minnesota for medical staff, he allowed us to come too. So we were in on what was known early on in the epidemic. He was also very patient to explain things in terms we could understand."
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Gerald J. Gleich, M.D. is recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on the eosinophil white blood cell and on eosinophilia of all sorts. From 1965 to 2001 he was a researcher at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. At present he is Research Professor of Dermatology and Medicine at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. He has listed his medical interests as including "diseases associated with eosinophilia, such as the hypereosinophilic syndrome, Churg-Strauss syndrome, the eosinophilia myalgia syndrome, the Spanish toxic oil syndrome, and the syndrome of episodic angioedema and eosinophilia. . . . Research interests include the functions of the eosinophil, the structure and function of eosinophil granule proteins, the role of the eosinophil major basic protein in primate pregnancy and the identification of novel treatments for allergic diseases, especially the use of topical anesthetics as anti-inflammatory agents."
Dr. Gleich has co-authored numerous research papers and articles which have been published in many medical journals. His article "Current Status of Research on EMS", written in 1998, can be found on our website. In 2016 he wrote an informational overview article on EMS, "Eosinophilia-Myalgia Syndrome", which has been published on NEMSN's website as well as at http://apfed.org/about-ead/eosinophilia-myalgia-syndrome/ by the American Partnership For Eosinophilic Diseases (APFED).
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Kim Sing Lo, D.O. is board certified in Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine (OMM) by the American Osteopathic Association. He has been in private clinical practice in New York City from 1994 until his retirement in 2015. Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine has proved to effectively treat the EMS symptoms of some patients.
Dr. Lo has also held several teaching positions. He served as Assistant Professor of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri (the world's foremost institution of osteopathic medicine) from 1991-92. From 1992-94 he was Assistant Professor at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine. Besides that, he has taught osteopathic intern physicians and students at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY. Dr. Lo was a recipient of a 1990 research grant from Burroughs Welcome and Mead Johnson to study the effects of Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment on patients with fibromyalgia.
To find other physicians who have been trained in the same way that Dr. Lo was, he recommends this website: www.cranialacademy.org
Note from NEMSN: Dr. Lo treated one EMS patient during epidemic times, and this person's symptoms improved under his care. More recently, for the past 15 years he regularly treated one more EMS patient, who credits him with saving her life and giving her back some of the functionality that was taken away by EMS. Dr. Lo has treated many others with conditions that have overlapping symptoms with EMS, such as fibromyalgia, and various autoimmune and musculoskeletal conditions.
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Stephen Naylor, Ph.D. joined our Medical Advisory Panel in 2016. Dr. Naylor is one of only a handful of distinguished scientists who have devoted years of research in an attempt to achieve a complete explanation of EMS. Known as a chemist, biochemist, toxicologist and business originator, he has co-authored hundreds of scientific research papers and book chapters while delivering uncounted presentations at universities and medical centers worldwide. In the 1990s he and NEMSN advisor Gerald J. Gleich, M.D. partnered at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN to undertake definitive EMS and L-tryptophan research. Naylor and Gleich received NIH and WHO grants and co-authored a number of scholarly papers during that period.
Stephen Naylor received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (UK) in Biochemistry. He completed postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he later became a visiting faculty member in the Division of Biological Engineering and a faculty member of the Computational Systems Biology Initiative. He earned additional scientific degrees from the University of East Anglia (UK), Southampton University (UK) and the University of California. From 1991-2001 he worked at the Mayo Clinic/Foundation, where he was founding director of a laboratory which specialized in determining the structure of chemical and biochemical molecules. He was also a tenured professor at the Mayo Foundation, teaching courses in such varied subjects as biochemistry, molecular biology, pharmacology, clinical pharmacology, and biomedical engineering.
The range of Dr. Naylor’s expertise is extraordinary. Among his achievements are contributions to the fields of gene studies, protein studies, metabolism, systems biology, nanofluid studies, computational biology, the miniaturization of mass spectronomy with microchips, and more recently drug discovery, and personalized medicine. Making use of his knowledge of spectroscopy and chromatography, Dr. Naylor has worked with Dr. Gleich to identify and describe the contaminating molecules that are believed to trigger EMS after consumption of tainted L-tryptophan.
Dr. Naylor is currently co-founder and CEO of ReNeuroGen, a spin-out drug discovery company from the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is also founder and CEO of MaiHealth Inc., a personalized medicine/molecular bioprofile diagnostics company in the health and wellness sector.