A couple of days ago, the article Falling Behind and Flailing About: the NIH, P2P, Dr. Francis Collins and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome appeared on the Health Rising site. It is a sobering description of what is going on (and equally importantly, what is not going on) at the high levels of the U.S. government concerning ME/CFS. For those who expect that federal funding for ME/CFS will be increasing anytime soon, this article will be rather disillusioning.
For a rather complete description of the political and financial situation surrounding ME/CFS in the U.S., I recommend reading all the links in the article. For example, the links contain everything from an illuminating description of the funding history of ME/CFS at the NIH to the biographies of ME/CFS experts who were excluded from the P2P Workshop to the biographies of speakers who believe ME/CFS is a functional somatic syndrome who were included in the P2P Workshop.
One of the links notes that the current annual budget of the NIH is $30 billion, while the amount allocated to ME/CFS research has been stuck around $5 million, and has actually been declining after inflation is taken into account. Compare that with the budget for AIDS research, which is $6 billion - more than a thousand times higher for approximately the same number of affected people. If AIDS were not under control and was still invariably fatal, this would be more understandable. But those days are long past, and it's been five years since Nancy Klimas said she'd rather have AIDS than CFS.
For comparison, although ME/CFS receives $5 million a year in funding, the study of male pattern baldness received $16 million last year.
From Meghan-Morgan Shannon's testimony before the CFSAC on October 30th, 2009, referring to a speech by Dr. Dan Peterson at the Second World Conference on CFS and Related Disorders in September, 1999:
The article and its references would seem to support Dr. Peterson's conclusion.
For a rather complete description of the political and financial situation surrounding ME/CFS in the U.S., I recommend reading all the links in the article. For example, the links contain everything from an illuminating description of the funding history of ME/CFS at the NIH to the biographies of ME/CFS experts who were excluded from the P2P Workshop to the biographies of speakers who believe ME/CFS is a functional somatic syndrome who were included in the P2P Workshop.
One of the links notes that the current annual budget of the NIH is $30 billion, while the amount allocated to ME/CFS research has been stuck around $5 million, and has actually been declining after inflation is taken into account. Compare that with the budget for AIDS research, which is $6 billion - more than a thousand times higher for approximately the same number of affected people. If AIDS were not under control and was still invariably fatal, this would be more understandable. But those days are long past, and it's been five years since Nancy Klimas said she'd rather have AIDS than CFS.
For comparison, although ME/CFS receives $5 million a year in funding, the study of male pattern baldness received $16 million last year.
From Meghan-Morgan Shannon's testimony before the CFSAC on October 30th, 2009, referring to a speech by Dr. Dan Peterson at the Second World Conference on CFS and Related Disorders in September, 1999:
The article and its references would seem to support Dr. Peterson's conclusion.
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