The Chief Medical
Officer
has again declined.
Once again Invest in ME are disappointed that the CMO could not
find a half of one day to attend a major international conference on ME
which is only a few hundred metres from his office (see
google map).
The response from the CMO came not from Sir Liam but from
the personal secretary to a Professor David Harper.
Professor
Harper
is the Director General for Health Improvement and Protection Directorate and
the Department’s Chief Scientist. This makes it even more
surprising that the reply failed to address our suggestion that,
with the news of the XMRV retrovirus being linked to ME, now would be a
good time to refocus efforts on ME and perhaps consider making ME a notifiable
illness. Due to the potential implications to the general population
of the XMRV research, which indicates that
this pathogen may be spread by bodily fluids and is therefore an infectious
disease, we would have expected a full response to our letter.
The correspondence is here -
