£8.5m for ME services
Health Minister Jacqui Smith has announced the Government is injecting £8.5m into services for people with ME.
The money will be used to support centres of excellence around the UK, and satellite multidisciplinary community teams to develop services within primary care to support GPs and other health professionals.
After the cash is released into the NHS next spring, it will also improve access for ME sufferers to specialists for improve diagnosis, treatment and management programmes, and support clinical research.
Leading ME charity, Action for ME, welcomes the announcement but stresses there is much to be done to bring services up to scratch for the 240 000 ME sufferers around the country.
AfME’s chief executive Chris Clark points out: “”While this is a great start, this amounts to only £35 for each person with ME”.
The charity launched a campaign on Monday to mark the start of ME awareness week, raising awareness of the £3.5bn cost to the UK every year in medical costs, benefits payments and lost earnings for ME sufferers.
It urged the Government to invest just 1% of the cost of ME, £35m, into a dedicated research programme to address the poorly understood condition.
The disease is also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a term which many sufferers object to because it fails to represent the true severity of the disease, which can leave people bedbound and incapacitated for years.
Symptoms include excessive physical and cognitive fatigue, severe muscular pain, insomnia, digestive disorders, extreme photosensitivity, and a variety of neurological disorders from dizziness to chronic migraines.
Dubbed ‘yuppie flu’ in the 1980s for its apparent prevalence amongst high achievers, the illness actually appears proportionally in all social groups, but affects twice as many women than men.
For decades there has been scepticism among some members of the medical profession about the existence of the disease, which remains poorly defined, and does not have a clear diagnostic test nor obvious treatment programme.
But as recently as the beginning of this month the Medical Research Council declared ME a ‘serious, debilitating condition’ calling for the research community to treat it as a priority area.
