The NHRMC said it will take time as it has to stagger targeted calls for research to manage within budget but it will be months, not years, before it happens.The NHMRC is consulting with the Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council’s working committee; Emerge Australia; the Department of Health and others in federal Australian government.Recently, the Australian government has failed to include people who have ME or diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and incorrectly stated 75% recover without treatment, when the figure is closer to a mere 5%. When ME is not included in these government reports or the figures are wrong, this negatively impacts policy and research.NHMRC is consulting medical colleges to form an expert advisory committee. Senator Scott Ludlum urged them to include Griffith University’s National Centre for Neuroimmunology and Emerging Diseases.NHMRC’s CEO, Prof Anne Kelso, said the NHMRC are serious about trying to identify what it could fund that would be effective.“The absence of a regulated diagnostic test being generally available, despite the fact that there is clearly some research progress, which is promising and exciting, the lack of a clear, simple set of diagnostic criteria and the lack of clear treatment protocols. The range of research questions that the patient group wish to have answered is very broad and the difficulty for us is how to define exactly which questions would be tractable with the type of budget which could be applied to such a targeted call for research,” Prof Kelso said.Prof Kelso said the NHMRC contacted the National Institutes of Health in the USA, to understand whether there is a way to collaborate with the NIH to ensure that the right work is done and leverage their broader expertise and broader budget. The NHMRC is waiting to hear back from the NIH.Senator Ludlam reminded the NHMRC that their research money in past years has been spent in New South Wales on research and treatments that encourage people to exercise, and that that is incredibly damaging for people with this condition....