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ME awareness week UK news articles .

pollycbr125

Senior Member
Messages
353
Location
yorkshire
Hi all i thought it might be an idea to collate any uk news articles that appear this week with it being ME awareness week .

my thought being we can see who is being positive and who is being negative towards the ME community . It may help us decide in future who to approach if we want things in the press .;)

a couple of articles ive found today

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/2...uring-national-awareness-week-86908-22247881/ ME sufferers battle to raise profile of condition during national awareness week - The Daily Record
www.dailyrecord.co.uk



http://www.bbc.co.uk/switch/slink/sexlovelife/reallife/living-with-me.shtml#1

BBC - Slink - Real Life Story - Living with M.E.
www.bbc.co.uk
Anna tells her story of being diagnosed and living with M.E. Do you have a story about teenage life? Tell Slink all about it.


@ admins if ive posted this in the wrong place please feel free to move my brains not quite in gear yet this morning :D
 

pollycbr125

Senior Member
Messages
353
Location
yorkshire

Adam

Senior Member
Messages
495
Location
Sheffield UK
The BBC page on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is laughable:

What's the treatment?

There's no specific treatment for CFS either. However, medicines can be prescribed to relieve the symptoms: for example, painkillers may be given for muscle pains and headaches, and antidepressants for depression.

Behaviour therapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, counselling, relaxation therapy, and graded exercise may help. Reducing stress, eating a healthy diet, rest periods, pacing and support groups also help many people with CFS.
 
K

_Kim_

Guest
UK ME expert to speak in Galway
GALWAY ADVERTISER, MAY 13, 2010. http://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/26082

This is a fantastic article. Thank you Orla for representing us so well in the media!!!

Orla Ni Chomhrai, co-ordinator of the Galway ME/CFS Support Group, says it is delighted to have such an eminent expert in the field coming to Galway.

Dr Weir has had many years experience in this area having seen over a 1,000 patients with the condition. With this meeting, we will have a chance to hear him talk about his views of the illness and will have an opportunity to ask him questions, and so gain the benefit of his knowledge.

Patients often have problems getting a diagnosis and adequate or appropriate support due to misunderstandings and ignorance surrounding the condition, she says.

Raising awareness helps educate the general public about the condition and the impact it can have on sufferers lives. It is also useful for people to find out that there are others out there experiencing similar problems and that there are patient support groups as it helps them feel less alone.
 

Dolphin

Senior Member
Messages
17,567
UK ME expert to speak in Galway
GALWAY ADVERTISER, MAY 13, 2010. http://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/26082
(Not particularly important) Just to point out or remind people that Galway and the Rep. of Ireland isn't part of the UK (while Northern Ireland is part of the UK) (the reason there was all that bombing, terrorism, etc. (in the past, mainly)in Northern Ireland is that some people in Northern Ireland want to be part of the Rep. of Ireland and others want to remain part of the UK - I am really not nationalistic but think it is worth pointing out given the thread title).
 

paddygirl

Senior Member
Messages
163
Rant


The only Journey to Bloody Wellness I'm interested in is to the WPI. If only we could get this fecker Parker on our side we'd have a chance. His PR (not this PR) is incredible. He manages to get non stop free advertising. That poor girl, how will she feel if she relapses, pregnancy can be good for ME, and then postpartum crash, I've witnessed it.

I know I'm ranting but I've had a hellish day, one of my lovely but unconscious friends told me I need some hobbies as I'm depressed.
 

Orla

Senior Member
Messages
708
Location
Ireland
Thanks Kim. I am glad the effort came to something. The article looks great in the actual paper (the paper was out today, I get it delivered - it is free). It is a full page so really stands out.

I do find the awareness raising is a good way of getting information about ME/CFS out to the general public (including health professionals who sometimes read these articles) and ME/CFS sufferers who may not have this information. I think it helps make people more aware, knowledgable and sympathetic to people with the condition.

Orla
 

Adam

Senior Member
Messages
495
Location
Sheffield UK
The only Journey to Bloody Wellness I'm interested in is to the WPI. If only we could get this fecker Parker on our side we'd have a chance. His PR (not this PR) is incredible. He manages to get non stop free advertising. That poor girl, how will she feel if she relapses, pregnancy can be good for ME, and then postpartum crash, I've witnessed it.

I know I'm ranting but I've had a hellish day, one of my lovely but unconscious friends told me I need some hobbies as I'm depressed.

You rant away Father Ted style all you like.
 

Dx Revision Watch

Suzy Chapman Owner of Dx Revision Watch
Messages
3,061
Location
UK
Guardian: Boseley: The trouble with ME, 13 May 2010

As it's Sarah Boselely, I thought we'd have it in full.

Some earlier Boseley from 2001:

Storm brews over ‘all in mind’ theory of ME, Guardian 20 September 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,554693,00.html

A very modern epidemic, Guardian 27 September 2001
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/medicalscience/story/0,,559001,00.html


Suppression, suppression, suppression...

"Charles Shepherd, medical adviser to the ME Association, says the real vitriol comes from a small number of people, but "it stifles debate in that people are not happy to express views if they think they are going to get shouted down or get abusive emails. It does scare decent people off from getting involved."

"And the patient groups agree that the inflammatory invective on the internet gets nobody anywhere. "From our point of view it is not productive," says Simpson of Invest in ME. "You get extreme elements. But this is an illness. We just want to cure it."


Strictly speaking, Invest in ME is not "a patient group". It is an organisation with charitable status run entirely by four trustees. It is not a membership organisation; its policies, direction and governance are the resposibility of its trustees, co-opted to the board by its existing trustees not by a voting membership via a democratic election process. This is not a criticism of the way in which Invest in ME chooses to operate, nor the activities in which they involve themselves, but it needs to be clarified that Invest in ME is not an organisation with a patient/carer membership base that influences or is consulted about the organisation's policies, positions, activities or affiliations.

Once again, our patient groups and ME organisations have assisted in promulgating a construct that the Guardian's Boseley has been promoting for ten years now - that is, that it is the bolshy patients who are to blame for the lack of decent research.

By the way, on 22 May, Dr Charles Shepherd of the ME Association will be attending an event and giving a talk on the MRC Research Programme and yet there is still no note of the November 2009 workshop published by the MRC.

On 6 May, I wrote again to the MRC's Corporate Information and Policy Officer (in my usual formal and polite manner) and received this response, on 10 May:

"I understand that we are waiting to confirm a couple of final details before the note and the presentations relating to the meeting can be published. We expect this to have been done shortly and as we have done previously we will let you know when the information is published."

"I can also confirm that the expert panel has met once more since workshop, this meeting was held on 1st March 2010. The meeting note will be published on the website once it is available, again we will let you know once this is published."

Over 6 months to publish a note or summary of the MRC workshop - a workshop for which the list of participants had to be obtained under FOI. So Dr Shepherd will be giving a talk on the "MRC Research Programme" yet the MEA's membership and the wider ME community has no summary of the research workshop or minutes of the March "CFS/ME Expert Panel" meeting to inform themselves of the discussions that took place at the November research workshop and any direction the MRC may be taking as a result of the workshop.

Keep us in the dark.
Keep us quiescent.
Paternalize.
Infantilize.
Demonize.

I am disappointed to see Invest in ME feeding into this, too.

------------

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/may/13/me-chronic-fatigue-syndrome

The trouble with ME

We mark ME awareness week with a report on the latest research into chronic fatigue syndrome – and the controversy that surrounds the subject

• Living with chronic fatigue syndrome

Sarah Boseley

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 May 2010

Lynn Gilderdale contracted ME when she was 14. Her mother helped her to die when she was 31. Photograph: David Cairns/Rex Features

Kay Gilderdale helped her 31-year-old daughter to kill herself over the course of one long December night, crushing up sleeping pills and antidepressants when the morphine overdose she gave her to inject did not immediately work. It's almost incredible to think that a mother and daughter could be driven to such hellish extremes by a disease that is not fatal. Lynn Gilderdale had ME.

But Lynn's extraordinary and distressing story takes few people acquainted with ME (myalgic encephalopathy), also known as CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), by surprise. If nothing else, it illustrates the despair that ME/CFS engenders. An estimated 250,000 people have the condition in this country, of whom 25,000 are children (Lynn became ill at 14). Most struggle to get a diagnosis, many are unhappy with the limited treatments available and all want to know what has caused them to be afflicted with this most miserable of illnesses, which saps their energy, wrecks their lives and leaves some like Lynn bedridden and tube-fed.

Last autumn, it suddenly looked as though they were going to get an answer. A paper was published in the highly regarded journal Science by the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) in Reno, Nevada, a research establishment set up by Annette Whittemore, the wife of a millionaire who had made money in property. Their daughter, Andrea, developed ME/CFS when she was 11. Whittemore, searching for help for her daughter, met Daniel Peterson, a general practitioner who brought to light one of the earliest ME clusters more than 30 years ago, in Incline Village on the north shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada, where he practised medicine. The two of them launched the WPI as a research centre dedicated to finding answers, and treatments for ME/CFS.

Peterson is one of many who believe the disease probably has a viral trigger. There is evidence that it can follow a viral infection, such as glandular fever. He put Andrea Whittemore on an experimental antiviral drug, which her mother has said has led to improvement.

Some cancers – cervical cancer is the best example – can also be triggered by a virus. In Incline Village, Peterson reported he had found a surprising number of rare cancers called mantle cell lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, among his ME/CFS patients. That attracted the attention of a cancer researcher, Dr Judy Mikovits. She joined WPI and went to work to look for a viral trigger for the cancer cluster.

Mikovits was soon reporting that she had found high levels of viruses in the ME/CFS patients by comparison. And then, in the Science paper in October, came the revelation that rocked the ME/CFS community as well as scientists around the world. Mikovits, with Vincent Lombardi and other colleagues from the WPI, reported that they had found a recently discovered retrovirus called XMRV in the blood cells of 68 out of 101 ME/CFS patients they had tested.

The implications were huge. If the virus were proven to be the cause of ME/CFS, then treatment could not be far away. It would also, in the eyes of many of the angriest campaigners, put paid to arguments that ME/CFS is predominanantly a psychosocial disorder – a theory they abhor and which has led to extraordinary invective, denunciations and bitterness, especially on the internet.

Annette Whittemore was certainly convinced her institute had found the biological key to the disease that cut down her "beautiful daughter who has been ill for 20 years in spite of our best efforts". Speaking to the CFS advisory committee of the US government's Department for Health and Human Sciences in late October, she said: "It ends the debate. CFS is not and never was a psychological disorder. Those who are ill have always known this. The physicians who take care of them have always known this and finally those who have attempted to keep patients from receiving medical care for this disease know this."

She and Mikovits were delighted that suddenly scientists from all over the world were homing in on their research. Certainly they had aroused great excitement and curiosity. But there was also a major public health issue here. HIV is a retrovirus. A retrovirus can be passed from one person to another in blood and semen. If XMRV, first associated with prostate cancer, is truly linked to ME/CFS, then we need to know about it fast, to prevent it spreading.

Retrovirologists were instantly on the case, attempting to replicate the WPI's findings. Three teams, two in the UK and one in the Netherlands, have already reported their results. All of them have drawn a blank.

Many people within the ME/CFS community refuse to believe it. They say the scientists have not properly replicated the WPI work. It's the line the WPI takes too, adamant that it has made a breakthrough. Richard Simpson of Invest in ME, which runs a major annual conference at which Whittemore will be a speaker this year, says the negative studies were too rushed.

He points out that Science took six months to review the WPI paper before publishing and that the research had support from the National Cancer Institute and the Cleveland Clinic, one of America's top hospitals.

"These other studies are not replications. They haven't used the same methodological approach. In any area of medicine you have to go back to the original tests and do it in the same way."

Simpson says he does not assume XMRV is the cause of the illness, but he and many others are deeply suspicious of what they believe are the attempts of scientists to dismiss once more the claims of ME/CFS to be considered a biomedical condition. They point out that it was classified as a neurological disease rather than a psychological illness by the World Health Organisation in 1969.

Listen to some – or read the internet – and you would think there is a massive organised conspiracy going on, led by the psychiatric community, but in conjunction with insurance companies and even government, to prove ME has no physical cause. (There are genuinely distressing stories about the failure of the Department for Work and Pensions to recognise that people with ME/CFS can be incapable of work, depriving them of sickness benefit.)

Nice, the National Institute for Healthcare and Clinical Excellence, has come under fire too for recognising only psychosocial treatments, in the shape of cognitive behaviour therapy and graded exercise programmes. They were taken to judicial review in 2009 by a group of people who claimed the experts who drew up their guidance were biased or had conflicts of interest. But Mr Justice Simon dismissed the case and took the unusual step of making a direct attack on those who brought it. "Unfounded as they were, the allegations were damaging to those against whom they were made and were such as may cause health professionals to hesitate before they involve themselves in this area of medicine," he said in an afterword to his judgment.

Most of the internet vitriol is directed at psychiatrist Professor Simon Wessely from King's College London, who believes there may be viral triggers for the disease but who pioneered the psychosocial therapies, ran the studies on which Nice's guidance is based and started the first NHS treatment unit. One of the reasons why the first UK study to fail to find XMRV in patients was denounced by ME/CFS activists is that it was co-authored by Wessely.

The other UK study is authored by a collection of top scientists who have either never been involved with the ME/CFS community before or who have in the past enjoyed its approval. Among them is Jonathan Kerr from St George's, University of London, who has been looking for genetic clues to the disease and is actually collaborating on a different project with the WPI.

Their study was published in a deliberately low-key way in Retrovirology. The researchers studied 170 blood samples from two separate groups of patients. Kate Bishop, a leading retrovirologist from the National Institute for Medical Research, said they tried hard to find XMRV but failed.

"I feel very sorry in a way," she says. "We were hoping it was true. One of the things patients don't seem to realise is that it is not in our interests to find a negative result either, but I do understand their frustration."

She thinks there are few differences between the US and European patients, except possibly that the WPI cases all came from geographical clusters.

What the European labs do not want to do is to take samples from the WPI to test. One possibility they cannot discount is that the WPI samples are contaminated with the virus, although the institute insists this is not so. Nonetheless, the European labs would not want to risk contamination.

On the day of the publication of the Science paper, the WPI declared it had now found XMRV in 95% of blood samples from ME/CFS patients it had tested – an extraordinarily high result. "This finding clearly points to the retrovirus as a significant contributing factor in this illness," said Mikovits in a statement on 8 October. But now the first euphoric blaze of publicity is over, the WPI appears to have put up the barricades. Its press officer said Mikovits was not giving interviews and asked for a list of questions. The questions went unanswered.

Meanwhile, the WPI has licensed the test it used to detect XMRV to a lab in Reno called Viral Immune Pathology Diagnostics (VIP Dx), charging $450 a time. Dr Vincent Lombardi, first author of the Science paper, was made director of operations for the licensing and development of the test. WPI points out that profits it makes are ploughed back into research, critics question the promotion of a test when scientists have not conclusively been able to show XMRV is a cause of ME/CFS and there is no treatment even if it is.

But patients are queuing up. Forty or 50 have been tested from the UK so far, and a substantial number have received a positive result. On an internet chat site, the comments are positive. "It must be a relief to finally know what has caused all this misery and stolen precious years," says one contributor.

Many doctors and scientists who work in the ME/CFS area are not willing to talk about it. However, one clinician who treats patients – and who was part of the Nice guideline group – put his head above the parapet after Kay Gilderdale was acquitted at Lewes crown court of attempted murder. Alastair Santhouse, consultant in psychological medicine at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, was deeply concerned by much of the press coverage, which depicted ME/CFS as a terminal illness and wrote to say so in the British Medical Journal.

"It was being talked about in terms of the euthanasia/assisted suicide debate," he said. "It is an awful illness – chronic, unpleasant and very isolating – but it is not a terminal illness. There are treatments available and they are not perfect but we as a profession should not be giving up on people.

"The patients I see in the clinic, generally speaking, are extremely relieved and pleased to find someone who is taking an interest in their case. They tend not to have any particular ideological position on the illness, but they just want to get better."

Santhouse is offering cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy, in line with the Nice guidance. "They don't work for everyone. Doctors have enough humility to realise they are not the complete answer." He doesn't pretend to know the cause but, he says, citing the historic treatments of foxglove for dropsy and quinine for malaria, "you don't always need to know the cause of something to be able to treat it".

Interestingly, in this deeply traumatised and divided field, there is some consensus. Everybody agrees ME/CFS is a terrible illness that seriously damages the lives of entire families. Nobody claims to know the definitive cause. Everybody agrees more research is needed – although conspiracy theorists say biomedical research proposals are blocked by the Medical Research Council, while others say those put forward are just not of sufficiently high quality. And the patient groups agree that the inflammatory invective on the internet gets nobody anywhere. "From our point of view it is not productive," says Simpson of Invest in ME. "You get extreme elements. But this is an illness. We just want to cure it."

Charles Shepherd, medical adviser to the ME Association, says the real vitriol comes from a small number of people, but "it stifles debate in that people are not happy to express views if they think they are going to get shouted down or get abusive emails. It does scare decent people off from getting involved."

Plenty of people have had – or are still having – very bad experiences with the medical profession, he says. Many GPs have no idea what to do. There are harrowing stories from people who are refused the employment and support allowance that has replaced incapacity benefit. Such things have radicalised people.

Sir Peter Spencer, former second Sea Lord and chief of defence procurement who has been chief executive of Action for ME for the last three years, agrees there is "far too much mud-slinging", but adds that "the significant majority feel so washed-out that they don't have the energy for invective . . . the thing that has struck me most is how I admire their resilience under really difficult circumstances."

Spencer, who still has all the drive of a senior naval officer, talks of the need for more specialist centres, especially for children, one of the issues taken up by the all-party parliamentary group on ME, which published its report into services in March. ME/CFS is the biggest single cause of long-term absenteeism among schoolchildren. Faster diagnosis and help for them is badly needed.

Whatever the final conclusion about XMRV, everybody hopes that the episode will generate more scientific research. But Simpson talks for the frustrated majority when he describes the case of one child on tube-feeding, whose consultant said she must have CBT and should be back in school within a week, and asks: "Why isn't science playing a part in trying to resolve this?"

He himself has two daughters with ME/CFS. It is not hard to imagine how tough that must be. "At the end of the day, it is about people's health," he says. "My daughters are ill because of this. I can't see anyone in this country who is tackling the problem."
 

pollycbr125

Senior Member
Messages
353
Location
yorkshire

It's almost incredible to think that a mother and daughter could be driven to such hellish extremes by a disease that is not fatal ........ this statement is incorrect ME is fatal it is stated as the cause of death on sophia mirzas death certificate . Also eveidence shows people with ME die on average 25 yrs sooner than their peers from heart problems and cancer . if thats not fatal i dont know what is .:Retro mad:
 

Min

Guest
Messages
1,387
Location
UK
To me that is not nice article - with lip service to the difficulties we face, overall it presents us as squabbling conspiracy theorists, not physically sick people maligned by the medical profession who desperately want to get better. Do I detect Ben Goldacre's influence?

Sir Peter Spencer of Action for ME describes us as 'washed out' - he's really no idea what neurological M.E. is like, has he?
 

Dx Revision Watch

Suzy Chapman Owner of Dx Revision Watch
Messages
3,061
Location
UK
Cf Dr Shepherd's quote in the Guardian Boseley piece

"Charles Shepherd, medical adviser to the ME Association, says the real vitriol comes from a small number of people, but "it stifles debate in that people are not happy to express views if they think they are going to get shouted down or get abusive emails. It does scare decent people off from getting involved."

with this quote from Action for M.E.'s CEO, Sir Peter Spencer:

http://www.forward-me.org.uk/24th November 2009.htm

Extract: FORWARD-ME Minutes of the meeting held on Tuesday 24 November 2009

iv) Charles Shepherd had circulated brief notes about the November workshop. Comprehensive summaries would be available on the MRC website. Key research projects had been identified and there were real indications from Professor Holgate of support from the MRC for a variety of different proposals some of which were not direct research – funding for PhD students, for example. Christine Harrison asked whether there were any experts in neuroimaging. Charles Shepherd said the key findings had been covered by a speaker who was not a neuroradiologist.

Peter Spencer said that remarks had been made about the aggressive nature of some of the correspondence together with the number of freedom of information requests from a few members of the ME/CFS community was taking up to 80% of one person’s time at the MRC. It was felt that this was unhelpful as the time could better used for constructive purposes. There was a danger that the hostility to the MRC would be used as ammunition against proposals for research for ME/CFS in what was an extremely competitive field. This was the best opportunity for research support for 10 years and the CFS/ME community should not let it slip through their hands. It was important to get new talent and new technology into the field. It was recognised that the heterogeneity of the disease made it hard to produce proposals.

Note that it is not specified who had made these "remarks" - Corporate Information and Policy, attendees at the MRC workshop, Prof Holgate?

I should add that I would not condone nor agitate for the submission of hostile or multiple applications for information under FOI.

This comment by Sir Peter is appalling:

There was a danger that the hostility to the MRC would be used as ammunition against proposals for research for ME/CFS in what was an extremely competitive field. This was the best opportunity for research support for 10 years and the CFS/ME community should not let it slip through their hands.

Sorry to go Off Topic, Polly, but the Guardian's Health Editor has been presenting the ME community as a bunch of savages who are discouraging researchers from becoming involved for far too long; Ms Boseley does not need any additional help with this from our patient orgs.

Since when has MRC research funding been allocated (or withheld) on the basis of the MRC's perceptions of the patient communities who would benefit from research proposals?

If the money is there, researchers will follow.
 

Dx Revision Watch

Suzy Chapman Owner of Dx Revision Watch
Messages
3,061
Location
UK
The following comments are also posted in this thread:

http://www.forums.aboutmecfs.org/showthread.php?4898-ME-awareness-week-UK-news-articles-.&p=80691


Some earlier Boseley from 2001:

Storm brews over ‘all in mind’ theory of ME, Guardian 20 September 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,554693,00.html

A very modern epidemic, Guardian 27 September 2001
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/medicalscience/story/0,,559001,00.html


Suppression, suppression, suppression...

"Charles Shepherd, medical adviser to the ME Association, says the real vitriol comes from a small number of people, but "it stifles debate in that people are not happy to express views if they think they are going to get shouted down or get abusive emails. It does scare decent people off from getting involved."

"And the patient groups agree that the inflammatory invective on the internet gets nobody anywhere. "From our point of view it is not productive," says Simpson of Invest in ME. "You get extreme elements. But this is an illness. We just want to cure it."

[...]

Once again, our patient groups and ME organisations have assisted in promulgating a construct that the Guardian's Boseley has been promoting for ten years now - that is, that it is the bolshy patients who are to blame for the lack of decent research.

By the way, on 22 May, Dr Charles Shepherd of the ME Association will be attending an event and giving a talk on the MRC Research Programme and yet there is still no note of the November 2009 workshop published by the MRC.

On 6 May, I wrote again to the MRC's Corporate Information and Policy Officer (in my usual formal and polite manner) and received this response, on 10 May:

"I understand that we are waiting to confirm a couple of final details before the note and the presentations relating to the meeting can be published. We expect this to have been done shortly and as we have done previously we will let you know when the information is published."

"I can also confirm that the expert panel has met once more since workshop, this meeting was held on 1st March 2010. The meeting note will be published on the website once it is available, again we will let you know once this is published."

Over 6 months to publish a note or summary of the MRC workshop - a workshop for which the list of participants had to be obtained under FOI. So Dr Shepherd will be giving a talk on the "MRC Research Programme" yet the MEA's membership and the wider ME community has no summary of the research workshop or minutes of the March "CFS/ME Expert Panel" meeting to inform themselves of the discussions that took place at the November research workshop and any direction the MRC may be taking as a result of the workshop.

Keep us in the dark.
Keep us quiescent.
Paternalize.
Infantilize.
Demonize.

I am disappointed to see Invest in ME feeding into this, too.

-------------

Cf Dr Shepherd's quote in the Guardian Boseley piece

"Charles Shepherd, medical adviser to the ME Association, says the real vitriol comes from a small number of people, but "it stifles debate in that people are not happy to express views if they think they are going to get shouted down or get abusive emails. It does scare decent people off from getting involved."

with this quote from Action for M.E.'s CEO, Sir Peter Spencer:

http://www.forward-me.org.uk/24th November 2009.htm

Extract: FORWARD-ME Minutes of the meeting held on Tuesday 24 November 2009

iv) Charles Shepherd had circulated brief notes about the November workshop. Comprehensive summaries would be available on the MRC website. Key research projects had been identified and there were real indications from Professor Holgate of support from the MRC for a variety of different proposals some of which were not direct research – funding for PhD students, for example. Christine Harrison asked whether there were any experts in neuroimaging. Charles Shepherd said the key findings had been covered by a speaker who was not a neuroradiologist.

Peter Spencer said that remarks had been made about the aggressive nature of some of the correspondence together with the number of freedom of information requests from a few members of the ME/CFS community was taking up to 80% of one person’s time at the MRC. It was felt that this was unhelpful as the time could better used for constructive purposes. There was a danger that the hostility to the MRC would be used as ammunition against proposals for research for ME/CFS in what was an extremely competitive field. This was the best opportunity for research support for 10 years and the CFS/ME community should not let it slip through their hands. It was important to get new talent and new technology into the field. It was recognised that the heterogeneity of the disease made it hard to produce proposals.

Note that it is not specified who had made these "remarks" - Corporate Information and Policy, attendees at the MRC workshop, Prof Holgate?

I should add that I would not condone nor do I agitate for the submission of hostile or multiple applications for information under FOI.

This comment by Sir Peter is appalling:

There was a danger that the hostility to the MRC would be used as ammunition against proposals for research for ME/CFS in what was an extremely competitive field. This was the best opportunity for research support for 10 years and the CFS/ME community should not let it slip through their hands.

...the Guardian's Health Editor has been presenting the ME community as a bunch of savages who are discouraging researchers from becoming involved for far too long; Ms Boseley does not need any additional help with this from our patient orgs.

Since when has MRC research funding been allocated (or withheld) on the basis of the MRC's perceptions of the patient communities who would benefit from research proposals?

If the money is there, researchers will follow.

ETA: I'm told there is no comment facility for the Boseley piece.