https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/15/long-covid-s...
You need a name for things. And long flu might have different etiology than long covid despite similar symptoms, so it doesn't make sense to lump them together as "long virus".
I think there's precedent for such a decision in how concussions are generally viewed. An individual can be diagnosed with a concussion, which has common, acute symptoms. If the acute symptoms last longer than is typical for a concussion of a given severity, the individual could be diagnosed with persistent post-concussive symptoms (a.k.a. post-concussion syndrome). Of course brain injuries are different than viral infections, and we still have a ton to learn about brain injuries, but it's the idea of clearly differentiating between the acute effects and the chronic, persistent long-term effects.
To be clear, I'm not trying to relate COVID with concussions beyond the medical nomenclature, but I think the nomenclature is effective in making the distinction to which I'm referring. It's not perfect, but we'll never have perfection in research.
Edit: It's unclear if the paragraph breaks are displaying properly, so I apologize if it appears as a wall of text.
Isn't that akin to "long covid"? No one mistakes post-concussion syndrome for a concussion, and no one mistakes long covid for an acute infection.
We do have a formal name for long covid: PASC (Post-Acute-Sequaelae of Covid)
It won't catch on a regular name because it's unpronounceable, but it there for the scientific literature and those who wish to speak formally.
I'm open to there being a better way, but ultimately you need something people can refer to, as it is a common phenomenon.
Personally I had Long Epstein-Barr for almost a year. So I know it's no joke.
Most virus infections can cause long term problems.
This is very, very false. Your body is currently fighting off a very large number of virus and bacterial infections. Most are innocuous, and don't even raise the symptoms of a cold.
Now, going out on more of a limb and moving into speculation:
There is a tiny minority of diseases -- most very new and poorly-understood -- which do this.
There's some evidence that prior to around 10,000 BC -- the rise of civilization -- very few diseases like this existed. What appears to have changed was that with civilization -- and now with population density and travel -- diseases can co-evolve with humans, and integrate into our various chemical signalling pathways. Things like Covid or AIDS can explicitly target our immune system, for example, to try to avoid being caught.
* Prior to civilization, a successful disease had to work across a broad range of species.
* When the population was a fraction of what it is today, there was less opportunity for disease to evolve.
* Without travel, there was less opportunity for spread (and for crosstalk between viruses)
... and so on.
These relatively new diseases can cause long-term problems. There's a lot of them, and it's not always the same ones as cause acute symptoms!
As our population grew and contact grew there were enough people around that a disease could sweep through a population then go elsewhere while a new generation grew up to be vulnerable when it finally came back.
Even with that, though, most of our disease are minor variants on stuff from the animal world. Covid appears to be simply the latest iteration of something that has periodically spilled into the human population in the past--except with the extremely nasty trait of asymptomatic spread. HIV is simply a minor variant on the already-existing SIV. It learned to target the immune system long before it targeted humans.
And of course, if you had not relied on a politically motivated, faulty, non-peer reviewed study you would find the following problems caused by Long Covid:
viral persistence https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01601-2
Microclots in the blood and endothelial dysfunction (leading to vascular problems, organ failure, cardiac events) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8883497/
Immune system dysregulation https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg7942
Mitochondrial damage https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240104/Study-identifies-...
And finally yes, blood-brain barrier disruption https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01576-9
and then stop spreading harmful propaganda. That's what you are doing, not "reporting a study", faugh!
It need to be more specific to be useful.
> It is because of these specific factors as well as inherent limitations of the study methodology itself, that their conclusion that it is “time to stop using terms like ‘long COVID’” is overstated and potentially unhelpful. Long COVID has been a global phenomenon, recognised by WHO.
> Unfortunately, this question cannot be simply answered in this work. The study is observational, based on reported symptoms with no physiological or detailed functional follow-up data. Without laboratory pathophysiological assessment of individual patients, it is impossible to say that this is indistinguishable from flu-related or any other post-viral syndrome.
Of course, every 'puchy-headline' paper deserves to be considered on its own merits, but perhaps read the paper not an article about the paper if you want to take it as 'The Truth'.
"Long covid is not a thing" plays into the "Covid is not a thing" conspiracy theory; it's probably a harmful trope, rather than meaningfully helpful for the people suffering symptoms.
There is universal agreement the symptoms are real.
It's unclear what benefit using a different name for it offers.
That something plays into a harmful trope doesn’t speak to its veracity though, and diminishing smaller inconvenient truths so as to not lead people astray in my opinion exacerbates rather than diminishes conspiracy theories.
Could probably have prevented a lot of wasted time, money, and endless internet arguments by saying something early on like “ivermectin, which humans are regularly prescribed, does look promising for treating Covid, but only at dosages that are very toxic to humans, or in populations that might have parasites, as a result of curing those parasites”, instead of the “lol it’s only for horses!” stuff, or by clearly stating “lab leak is possible, and not the same thing as an intentionally man-made bioweapon unleashed by Chinese people”.
This wasn't a good study, scientifically. Scrutiny was not applied before reporting on it, and now we have a harm on our hands. The fact that we're discussing it attests to that, since its a sideshow leeching attention away from the main topic of long covid's effects.
Agree that public messaging could have and should be a lot better on the topics you mentioned, but disagree that harm should not be at least a part of the calculus.
There were plenty of places which published long, complex, nuanced data and explanations about ivermectin.
But lots of people are unable to understand complex writing or statistics. And most people have little understanding of biology, medicine or disease. This led to widespread misinformation, which in turn led people to try to simplify out all the complexity, and trim it down to basic things like "ivermectin doesn't work" and "don't take horse medicine when your doctor refuses to prescribe ivermectin to you".
The messaging you think would have "prevented a lot of wasted time" was exactly the messaging in the medical reports that started the whole problem. Dumbing it down was a response to the "internet arguments".
Dumbing a message down to contain no nuance — in my opinion — opens up the floor for quacks who will be exploit the lack of nuance on their podcasts.
COVID was the devil virus and people were attributing many things to it. And since there is no diagnostic test for "long COVID", we are sorta just guessing everywhere here.