A grieving dad told the ECHO about the devastating disease that destroyed his daughter "a little piece at a time".
Andrew Lynch's daughter, Natasha, was working in her dream job as a holiday rep in 2014 when she noticed she was taking a long time to recover from minor illnesses.
Natasha, from Liverpool, then contracted viral meningitis and took a break from work to be cared for by her family in Spain.
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She suffered several more serious episodes of illness over the next few years and at one point temporarily lost her speech, memory and woke up fighting for breath.
Natasha was left paralysed from the waist down and reliant on a ventilator to breathe.
After doctors struggled to diagnose what was happening to her, one finally worked out that her rare group of conditions might be down to mitochondrial disease.
Andrew, 55, who lives just outside Alicante in Spain told the ECHO: "To me, it's the mother of all diseases, it really is. It takes you away piece by piece and kills you a little piece at a time. And every time it strikes you don't know what's going to happen next.
"There's a lot of very nasty diseases out there but with a lot of them you've got a chance. You've got medication for them, you've got possible cures for them, but mitochondrial disease there isn't - there's absolutely nothing at all.
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"As time went on she started to deteriorate quite a lot within the last year. There was a lot more complications and eventually it hit more of her internal organs - her bowel in particular which was failing on her.
"She had been in hospital and came home and she just suddenly started vomiting blood three days before she died.
"For a month beforehand she was forever asking for somebody to stay with her all the time .She always wanted to be with me or her step mum, Dawn."
In a devastating blow for her family, Natasha died in hospital on June 29, last year with her dad by her bedside.
Talking through tears, Andrew said: "She apologised to me the day she died. She apologised to me for what she'd done - I said, 'You've done nothing, Natasha.' She apologised for putting me through so much pain. She always thought of somebody else.
"For what that girl has been through in her life. She'd gone through hell in her life but still she always thought of other people.
"Natasha was a very private person, she had a life we didn't even know she had especially on the Internet.
"It was only when she died we were astounded by the amount of people that she'd touched. We had over a hundred thousand people contact us, it was unbelievable."
Andrew has since discovered that Natasha was in contact with people all over the world through the Internet, helping them come to terms with their own incurable conditions.
According to the Lily Foundation : "Mitochondrial disease, or 'mito', is the term given to a group of medical disorders caused by mutations in mitochondria, the tiny organelles that are present in nearly every cell in our bodies and which generate about 90% of the energy we need to live."
"Cells cannot function properly without healthy mitochondria, so when they fail the consequences can be serious and wide-ranging."
Mitochondrial diseases can affect sufferers in multiple ways, depending on the cells affected. This can make the condition hard to diagnose, with symptoms often resembling those of other serious illnesses.
There is currently no cure for mitochondrial disease.
Andrew said: "Natasha was at the extreme end of the disease, we know this. Some people can have mitochondrial disease and it can just make them tired.
"And then you can have people like Natasha whose whole life got destroyed."
Andrew called on governments to fund more research and prioritise finding treatments for the cruel disease that took his daughter, in the same way that's being done for cancer and Alzheimer's disease.
He added: "There are people and suffering and dying. In years to come with the right funding there might be a cure but not until the right funding comes.
"Nobody in the world should suffer the way my daughter suffered."
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