Scottish ME Action update their manifesto. Call for commitment of £1m per year by the CSO for biomedical research :-) amongst other things

https://www.meaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/MEAction-Scotland-Manifesto_29_10_18.pdf


CSO is Chief Scientist’s Office and they include other relevant bodies,

They say figure Is proportional to the disease burden.

£1m is £48 per Scottish person affected per year.

Im delighted to see specific funding calls as part of their campaign. Does the #MEAction Uk have any similar manifesto does anyone know,? I just saw this on Facebook.

 

Under a quid a week, unless the Scottish don't have paid holidays, in which case it's a quid a week.

Researchers and labs must be cheap in Scotland, or expected to be so.

Why such a ludicrously low figure, as an ask? I can understand why, politicians being what they are,they may not be awarded more than that, or even that, but to ask for so little.........befuddles me.

 

How is it a £1 a week ? 1 million divided by 52 is £19 ,000. Sorry I see you are meaning per person. Well in context across the UK aLzheimers gets £88 per person per year or was until recently , it might have significantly increased, so its half of that. £1 a week pp is far better than the £1 per year pp biomedical research spending we have averaged in UK past ten years.

 

This might be my fault. In support of the petition to the Scottish Parliament I said:

It would be proportionate for at least one centre in Scotland to have an annual research budget for ME of at least £500,000-£1M.

But I did say at least.

Scotland has a track record for being ahead of the game. £1M in Scotland would make it look mean not to have £10M for the UK. That would be enough to cover a lot of useful work. I think this is pitched at a credible level.

 

Please have more " faults" !

 

Go Scotland, go!

 

First search result gave a CSO budget of just £69million.
https://www.cso.scot.nhs.uk/about/

So proportionally this is like looking for around $541 million or so from the NIH (research budget of $37.3 billion in FY2018, the first search result). MS gets less than $100 million the last time I checked.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to call for this amount just putting things in perspective. The total research budgets in many/most countries are relatively small.

 

Yes, Australia actually spends more than many countries despite it's smaller size...

UK: https://mrc.ukri.org/about/what-we-do/spending-accountability/facts/ (about $1 billion USD)

Australia: https://aamri.org.au/news-events/2019-20-federal-budget-whats-in-it-for-medical-research/ ($730 million USD)