<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/07/boris-johnson-may-not-believe-in-it-but-long-covid-is-real-and-underfunded>
"Among the more sobering moments at the UK Covid-19 inquiry over the past few
weeks was the palpable dismay and affront shown by the mild-mannered NHS
respiratory consultant Prof Chris Brightling, when he noted that Boris
Johnson’s response to a Department of Health briefing on long Covid was to
write “bollocks” across it in large letters. Brightling said he was “deeply
saddened” and made “extremely angry” by the comment. “Does he mean bollocks to
the science?” he mused, or “is it bollocks to the patients?” For the millions
of sufferers whose lives, careers and finances have been shattered by the
disease, it may be hard to disengage from the idea that this opinion fed into
the disease being wilfully ignored.
The inquiry is a reminder that even as public (and policy) attention span for
all things Covid has inevitably waned, it is worth looking at the state of play
for the many millions of patients, advocates and researchers around the world
still very much grappling with long Covid. From where I sit – somewhere between
the international long Covid medical research community, the patient support
groups, and those running long Covid clinical services – I’d describe it as a
rather bleak period, with a continuing crisis of confidence for all concerned.
In each of these spheres there has come the stark realisation that the initial
momentum (and with it, much of the funding) has fallen off the cliff edge.
There have been incredible scientific advances in our understanding of the
disease, but we are also learning how little we actually know. Gez Medinger, my
colleague and co-author, has described the initial research as being like a
huge jigsaw puzzle with some of the easy bits in place around the edge, and
everyone trying to guess if the picture in the middle is of a horse or a steam
engine. Some thousands of peer-reviewed publications later, many more pieces
are in place and the edge of the jigsaw is going well, but we’ve come to
realise that the disease – the way it works, and its symptoms – is so
heterogeneous that we may actually have mixed up several jigsaws of horses,
steam engines and sunsets, yet are trying to solve a single one from the
jumbled pieces.
This is similar to the state of diabetes diagnoses, before we stratified them
into type 1 and type 2 and several states in between. It may be that someday
what we now call “long Covid” will be stratified into several different disease
entities.
For researchers working in the many medical areas that appear to be affected by
long Covid – such as blood coagulation, autoimmune disease, viral persistence,
organ damage, or any number of others – the big picture remains challenging.
How can these areas be pulled together in such a way as to make a real clinical
difference? A new study published in
Cell gives us a sense of the problem, as
it reports intriguing new information about how long Covid may work, but also
complicates our overall understanding."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: November 9, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-92570484
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
