3rd Annual Community Symposium on the Molecular Basis of ME/CFS at Stanford University, sponsored by OMF, 7th Sept 2019

Because the money was there. NASA spending around this time was enormous because of the Soviets.

At its peak for the moonshot, NASA captured 4.5% of federal spending, which today would amount to about $170B per year.

At $170B per year, we would solve ME in 2-5 years. Zero doubt about that, it's actually more than the total historical AIDS spending.

Total effort is will * funding * competence. We rate almost zero on all counts, sadly for competence because deniers aggressively involved themselves instead of actual competent people. Failure is a choice.

Though obviously we would never get such humongous budgets but a sizeable fraction of the AIDS budget, say 20% or 30%, would actually make fiscal sense as the losses during the 3 decades of psychosomatic nonsense amount to more than the entire moonshot, funded with barely nothing and much of it actually wasted on crap like personality psychometrics.

Actually want to calculate this: at around $100B (very conservative estimate) in economic losses per year worldwide, since the CFS sabotage, this is comfortably over $2T in economic losses that have been pissed away by leaving us to fend for ourselves. Money that was as effectively wasted as simply taking it off bank ledgers, printing it and burning it.

Adjusted for inflation, the US spent approximately $1.32T on NASA since its inception. (peak spending was fairly short-lived and dropped down a lot after 1969)

Significantly more money than was spent for the entire lifetime of NASA was wasted by leaving us to suffer and die without support. That's the scale of the failure here, it's seriously beyond reason to keep on wasting this many lives. And to those who only care about money, our loss is also evident as more than the entire lifetime operative costs of NASA. What a stupid waste of human potential.

And this is just the last 30 years, knowledge of ME goes back 50 so the numbers are even worse than that.

 

I find it interesting that we may have been lumbered with much of the psychogenic theory of chronicity in ME as a result of about 18 years of funding from the US Army Chemical Corps from the bio-warfare budget. It is a shame that similar amounts were not provided for purposes of replication of the findings.

 

The Norwegian ME Association - Buskerud County - was present during the Symposium and got this interview with Ron Davis. No big news, but a nice summary of his work in layman's terms.

 

OMF: An Exciting Week for Advancing ME/CFS Research

https://www.omf.ngo/2019/09/16/an-exciting-week-for-advancing-me-cfs-research/

Linda Tannenbaum

I’m pleased to share with the OMF community that the OMF sponsored Stanford ME/CFS Working Group and Third Annual Community Symposium on the Molecular Basis of ME/CFS once again is helping to advance urgently needed research on this disease.

During the three days prior to the Community Symposium, 60 scientists from all over the world, including OMF Scientific Advisory Board members, actively participated in the Working Group. They gathered behind closed doors to brainstorm and openly discuss new ideas to move this field forward…

 

OMF Community Symposium on the Molecular Basis of ME/CFS 2019

The individual talks are now available on YouTube –

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl4AfLZNZEQPiRL9zpis8LtfaHBEMy4jS

 

Yep! It's a public health crisis created through negligence. There's no excuse to not redouble efforts to "fix" what they broke

 

The statement is nice and succinct to tge extent that I wonder if it could be used in a graphic or protest chant , wrt ME