Letters: Public spending and deficit

"What happens now that 95 per cent of the study group of myalgic encephalomyelitis sufferers have been found to have antibodies to the highly contagious retrovirus XMRV, and 65 per cent tested positively for it?

Will the UK medical authorities take this seriously enough to move quickly and test and where appropriate give currently available antiretrovirals to the quarter of a million ME sufferers, as they now do with HIV and Aids sufferers? Will they at last acknowledge just how very ill and at risk of premature death many ME sufferers are? Will they advise health workers on how to avoid contamination from retrovirus XMRV?

Or will they, as seems more likely, continue to give all research and treatment funding to the psychiatrists who have taken all ME research and treatment funding for over two decades, while pretending that ME is imaginary?

Will they continue to mix ME sufferers up with sufferers of mental disorders in their ridiculously named "chronic fatigue" clinics?

Will they continue the daft practice of offering only graded exercise, which makes sufferers worse, and cognitive behaviour therapy, which does nothing?

This 58-year-old sufferer of severe ME for the past 21 years would like some answers. It seems there is an epidemic of a serious contagious physical illness in the UK that the medical authorities have been ignoring for far too long."

Hilary Patten

Frome, Somerset