Premiers are meeting in Winnipeg next week for their annual Council of the Federation meeting and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall will be urging them to follow his lead in promising to fund trials of a controversial new treatment for Multiple Sclerosis. However, he is prepared to go it alone in pursuing an “avenue of hope” for the some 3,500 people in his province who suffer from MS – the highest rate in the country.

On Tuesday, Mr. Wall said his government is willing to look at proposals for research projects to test the link between MS and Chronic Cerebrospinal Venous Insufficiency (CCSVI), clogged veins in the neck that can be fixed through vascular surgery dubbed the “Liberation Treatment” by the Italian surgeon who came up with the CCSVI theory, Dr. Paolo Zamboni.

Since CCSVI leapt into the global spotlight last November, MS patients and their families have clamoured for the procedure. So far, it is only available in a handful of countries although a few private clinics in Canada offer CCSVI tests to identify if patients would be candidates for the procedure.

The federal government has taken a cautious approach to the unproven procedure, and has asked the Canadian Institutes for Health Research for its advice. The latter will be holding an expert roundtable on the subject next month.

In the House of Commons in June, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq said her government “will balance the urgency of this issue with the importance of asking the right questions and getting the right answers.” She has so far not commented on a request from the MS Society of Canada to spend $10 million on research to explore the CCSVI-MS connection.

The MS Society is investing $700,000 in four research projects at Canadian universities to understand the prevalence and significance of CCVSI. The organization has said these studies are needed because it is not known whether, or how, CCSVI contributes to MS disease activity.

While Mr. Wall has emphasized that his government will be guided by the advice of the research community, his forthright comments about being willing to finance clinical trials have catapulted him into a leadership role.

His provincial colleagues have so far been reluctant to follow. British Columbia, Manitoba, Alberta and Nova Scotia have all indicated they will not be funding any clinical trials on CCSVI before more research is in, and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty was non-committal in speaking to reporters this week.

Alberta’s health minister plans to raise the matter when he meets his colleagues in September, but there has been no comment yet from Ms. Aglukkaq on Mr. Wall’s announcement. HE