It came down to the wire, but HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell has renewed the charter of the CFS Advisory Committee. While there are no sweeping changes to the charter, some of the changes may have you scratching your head.
CFSAC is a chartered advisory committee, meaning that it is created by the head of HHS and must be reauthorized every two years (by law). The charter is the operational framework for this committee, defining its purpose and the basics of its functioning. Regulations and HHS policy run in the background, but the charter sets many of the rules. I did a line by line comparison between the old and new charter to see what will be different for the next two years.
All in a Name
Throughout the charter, the word CFS has been replaced with ME/CFS. On the one hand, this reflects the overall change in how people refer to this illness. But the name of the committee is the same; it is not the ME/CFS Advisory Committee. It is still CFSAC, despite the changes in the document itself.
The other puzzler here is the fact that the IOM study includes a recommendation on the name of the disease. What will happen if IOM says the disease should be called ME or Ramsay’s Disease or something entirely new? Will we have to fight HHS all over again for them to use the appropriate terminology?
Purpose
The purpose of the CFSAC is unchanged: to provide advice and recommendations on a broad range of issues related to ME/CFS. As a side note, it is interesting to see how the areas covered by CFSAC have been stripped away by other initiatives. The CFSAC is supposed to advise on the state of knowledge and gaps in research, but that’s being done by P2P. Impact and implications of diagnostics and treatment is partly covered by IOM. Development of education programs is partly IOM and partly CDC (which has strongly resisted CFSAC’s attempts to influence here). Partnering to improve patient quality of life is about the only thing still solidly CFSAC.
Report Structure
As in previous charters, CFSAC makes its recommendations to the Secretary through the Assistant Secretary. Management and support services are provided by the Office of the Assistant Secretary, as before. The Office of Women’s Health (OWH) has never been mentioned by name in the charter, but there is little doubt that the CFSAC will remain in that office. The new DFO, Barbara James, is a staff member in OWH, and Dr. Nancy Lee has said she will remain available to assist in the transition.
Money
The most significant change in the charter is the committee budget. The annual cost for operating the committee, which includes the travel stipend but excludes the cost of staff support, has decreased 47%. This probably reflects the move to only one in-person meeting per year.
However, the cost of staff support has gone up. The estimated staff time is 1.5 full time equivalent staff for the year. This does not mean that one person only works on CFSAC, though. It’s an estimate of combined staff time, and presumably includes the contractor cost for the meetings. The cost of that staff time has increased almost 52%.
Overall, the budget for CFSAC has increased by about 12%. That sounds reasonable, but it comes at the cost of an in-person meeting. If the travel stipend was retained for two meetings per year, the increase would have been at least 33%.
The More Things Change . . .
What difference will any of these changes make? Probably not much. We already knew that we were going to lose an in-person meeting, given the trend over the last year. The CFSAC is still lodged in OWH, with a member of Dr. Lee’s staff in the role of DFO. We don’t know much about Barbara James at this point. Her public health career has focused on women’s and minority health issues, including a project to include gender focus in the Healthy People 2010 initiative. The fall meeting of the CFSAC will be our first opportunity to assess how she will approach her new role as DFO of the committee.
*My thanks for Denise Lopez-Majano for assisting with the research for this piece.