According to the official “Nevada Legislative Appropriations Report” published for the 2007-09 biennium by the Legislative Counsel Bureau, the Legislature approved $1 million “to provide funding for staff and operating costs to study, research and understand Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).” You gotta be kidding us, right?
Nope. The money was earmarked to hire “a total of 4.75 positions” - which I guess means the fifth person hired has to be shorter than the average, full-sized person. The positions Nevada taxpayers are being forced to fund in this time of economic difficulty include a new Executive Director, a Basic Research Director, a Clinical Virologist, a Postdoctoral Fellow, a Graduate Assistant and a “short” clerical/support person.
Where to begin?
Let’s start with Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley’s whining about potential budget cuts having a “devastating effect” on the state’s “most vulnerable” citizens. How would cutting $1 million from the budget by eliminating 4.75 positions to study people who are chronically tired hurt the “most vulnerable” among us - unless the chronically tired who are being studied are stay-at-home moms.
Secondly, why in the world are Nevada taxpayers being asked to shell out $1 million to “study” CFS when the federal Department of Health and Human Services’ Center for Disease Control and Prevention is already spending millions of taxpayer dollars to study it? If the federal government is already providing this “service,” why are Nevadans being asked to fund a duplicative effort?
And lastly, why are we funding the study of a “disease” which may not even exists?
As Wikipedia notes, many doctors “have refused to diagnose” CFS, while others have minimized its seriousness. “There remains considerable skepticism amongst some medical professionals about the existence of CFS as a ‘real’ — i.e. medical as opposed to behavioral — condition,” the online encyclopedia notes. “Many people are inclined to believe that a condition with few or no specific biomedical markers may be psychological in origin.”
A million dollars to study a “disease” which many medical professionals doubt even exists and which is already being studied by the federal government?
Scalpel!
Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Nevada
With all my respects, or even with no respect at all, because I also feel insulted by your article:
-First of all, investing in CFS Research will save money for World Wide tax payers, because CFS is already costing many million dollars world wide due to the degree of disability of this illness, which is comparable to MS, AIDS or Cancer late stage… Watch the video from CDC in the Awareness Campaign of 2006!
-Secondly, there are already more than 4.000 research studies that proofs that this disease is REAL, and the debate you post should be OVER.
I honestly recommend you not to write an article in the future of a subject you obviously do not know, and your strongest documentation effort is to take a sentence out of context in Wikipedia!
And of course you won’t publish my comment, because you would look like a moron, but at least delete this article because you are offending millions of people that have to cope with this illness and we are screaming for help, for research, for a cure, for a treatment… the problem that we have is that we do not die, and this is not a contagious illness like aids, and that is why we are neglected by people like YOU, that do not care… I just hope that it does not happen to a family member of yours, or to yourself, because although it would be a lesson for you, it would be the hard way, and I do not desire that for anyone, not even you.
Regards
C.
Pochoams,
Joan of Arc did less whining on the stake.
C.
According to LCB report on page 173, this $1,000,000 request did not originate with NSHE but came from the Governor himself.
The employees will work and be employees of the Whittemore-Peterson Institute- a 501(c)(3) charity. Annette Whittemore is the Founder of the Institute, now what is the name of her husband?
See also the Wisconsin Chronic fatigue Syndrome Asociation.