Invitation to UK's Chief Medical Officer to IIMEC5
On 26th October 2009 Invest in ME formally invited the UK's Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, to open the 5th Invest in ME International ME/CFS Conference 2010 in Westminster, London.
Invest in ME have invited the CMO to attend or present at our conferences in all of our recent years.
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 -
Invest in ME Letter to CMO - 26th October 2009
CMO Reply to invest in ME - 26th November 2009
The Chief Medical Officer did not answer our specific question.
Below is the letter sent to the CMO by Invest in ME to repeat our question. We are currently awaiting a response from the CMO -
