Blog: Occupy ME: NIH 2017 Funding Fact-Check

[Andy]

Today, we need to revisit and reconcile NIH’s funding numbers for FY 2017. NIH is reporting that it spent $15 million dollars on ME/CFS research last year, but this includes several non-ME/CFS studies. The truth is that NIH actually spent $1 million LESS than what it claims.

NIH reports its funding by disease category each year. If you look at the chart, you’ll see that the “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS)” category reports $15 million for 2017. That number is hyperlinked to a list of all the projects NIH includes in that $15 million. The projects listed on the page come to a total of $14,727,730, although I found a few small amounts left off that total. If I add those all in, it brings NIH’s claimed FY 2017 total to $14,780,406–which NIH rounds up to $15 million.

http://occupyme.net/2018/07/23/nih-2017-funding-fact-check/

 

[Londinium]

So there was a thread I posted on in 'the other forum' about a year ago about a similar article looking at NIH data and which drew a lot of incorrect conclusions. It was one of the things that stopped me lurking there because, as a former government accountant, it was something I could contribute on.

All I would say is that one should be very careful in drawing conclusions about ME/CFS funding in particular as some of the issues identified are not specific to ME/CFS; they are just down to way NIH categorises its data for any condition. NIH's data presentation is bloody awful. Overall we're showing over an 80% YoY increase and I would expect this to increase further in 2018-2019 (you should ignore the $14m shown for FY19 as that will almost certainly increase when the final outturn is known). Overall I don't think this analysis is as much of an 'ah hah!' moment as maybe it is portrayed - even if you take the analysis as given (and I think I'd quibble over the exclusion of Dr Light's research), a difference of <7% is pretty good by government accounting standards.