11 ms·

Covid has been found in the brains and organs of Long Covid sufferers at autopsy while not being found in their blood in PCR testing. Bhupesh Prusty recently fo

Covid has been found in the brains and organs of Long Covid sufferers at autopsy while not being found in their blood in PCR testing. Bhupesh Prusty recently found in an autopsy of 4 ME/CFS sufferers they had HHV-6 in their brain and spine and 3 of the 4 also had EBV too where 28 controls did not. The DOD just last year also linked Multiple Sclerosis to EBV. There is growing evidence that many viruses stick with us in cells, are not found in the blood and can lead to severe chronic illnesses later in life. A lot of microbiome research is leading to particular bacteria in or missing from the gut being correlated with various diseases like diabetes and obesity and almost all chronic diseases have a corresponding microbiome adjustment. We don't know yet know if there is a cause here or its just correlated but its a potential diagnostic that shows long before more serious symptoms and could potentially be used diagnostically one day. Or it might be these shifts are causal and we need to find a way to restore gut function that works well and reliably. The fundamental idea is becoming mainstream in research with significant labs working on this for Long Covid, ME/CFS as well as EDS across the globe. Its not a fringe idea in research looking at long neglected diseases and the more they look the more they find evidence for it. Its not something the vast majority of doctors would have any knowledge on today, most would consider it ridiculous despite thousands of papers on this topic with growing evidence for the fundamental idea of ongoing infections causing increasing problems.

heywhatupboys 4y ago
there are literally no peer reviewed scientific study demonstrating the pathology of "long covid". In fact, there aren't really any knowledge that there is such as thing as "long covid" in the way we traditionally define diseases
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Google long covid ncbi for a long list of papers. I don’t know what you mean with your no true Scotsman fallacy, there’s definitely something and quite a lot of research establishing what. Where did you get your information?
  - collyw 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Can you name one biomarker for depression or severe PTSD or bipolar disorder? Do you believe those don't exist either?
      - collyw 4y ago
        The majority of long covid is fake though. It will be suffered by the same hypochondriacs that had gluten intollerance last decade and dust allergies before that. You are are that the definition of long covid is along the lines of "anything that can't be explained that happened after a covid infection" absolute horseshit propagandized by the media. Show me some biomarkers and I'll start paying attention.
        atombender 4y ago
        How do you know they're hypochondriacs? Are there studies showing long-COVID patients to be hypochondriacs? Or are you a doctor who has examined lots of patients who turn out to be hypochondriacs?
        collyw 4y ago
        Watch the video I linked to, it contains a well designed study that gives good evidence in favor of that hypothesis. You won't though, will you?
        atombender 4y ago
        I watched it and skimmed the paper. I did not see any claim that people are hypochondriacs, nor any evidence for it.
    - Retric 4y ago
- ck2 4y ago
  There are hundreds of papers on Long Covid, many peer reviewed. Someone on reddit keeps track of them all: https://reddit.com/r/LongHaulResearch https://reddit.com/r/LongHaulResearch also: https://reddit.com/r/COVID19/search/?q=pasc https://reddit.com/r/COVID19/search/?q=pasc
Retric 4y ago
I think you’re underestimating doctors. Viral infections sticking around has been known about for a very long time. Chronic infection of Hepatitis C for example occurs in about 80% of those infected and it can be asymptomatic for years while causing liver etc damage. This includes many viral infections that the general public don’t realize stick around: “The causative agent for shingles is the varicella zoster virus (VZV) – a double-stranded DNA virus related to the herpes simplex virus. Most individuals are infected with this virus as children which causes an episode of chickenpox. The immune system eventually eliminates the virus from most locations, but it remains dormant (or latent) in the ganglia adjacent to the spinal cord (called the dorsal root ganglion) or the trigeminal ganglion in the base of the skull.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles Typhoid marry is a famous example of this behavior occasionally extending to viruses that generally get cleared from the body.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Everybody has been aware of hepatitis C, herpes, and chicken pox becoming shingles for decades. I'm pretty sure this discussion is about viruses that we generally don't think of as chronic.
- rhacker 4y ago
  H. Pylori has been around for 20 years, hundreds of papers written on it. My wife went in and the doctor said - huh, I haven't seen that before I need to go look up how to treat it, I'll be right back. That is, of course, after we did our own GI-MAP and took it to a doctor, not that a doctor would EVER suggest doing that. A naturopath? Yes they do it as a standard. Standard doctors are operating on 1960's textbooks.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Doctors are required to keep getting recertification based on current practices, they can’t just regurgitate outdated information. General practitioners refer people to specialists because nobody can keep up with every bit of new research out there. A doctor looking something unusual up isn’t a sign of incompetence but rather best practices.
cjbgkagh 4y ago
Double checking, by ‘EDS’ that wasn’t a typo and you meant Ehlers Danlos Syndrome? I’ve been beating the drum for underdaignosed EDS for a long time. It’s insane how prevent it is in so many statistics and yet doctors still think it’s super rare. I think a huge number of Long Covid people have EDS, way more than the general population, they’re highly disposed to it. It would make sense that a treatment for EDS would help LongCovid and visa versa.
oigursh 4y ago
> we need to find a way to restore gut function that works well and reliably. Microbiota engraftment from faecal transplants _is_ reliable - it brings along a raft of bacteriophages that clear a niche for the incoming colonies - unlike just slinging some probiotics down your neck and hoping some survive.
2devnull 4y ago
“the vast majority of doctors would have any knowledge on today, most would consider it ridiculous despite thousands of papers on this topic with growing evidence” Are doctors, as a group, becoming stupider? I’m not trying to troll by asking that question. I legitimately feel, as a patient of a large HMO, that the doctors I interact with aren’t very bright, making frequent mistakes about stuff they could google as quickly as they give out wrong information, but instead confidently insist upon something they’re misremembering or have never learned correctly in the first place. It feels like the profession has been optimizing for the wrong things: quick recall of a breadth of information rather than a scientific orientation towards the work. Perhaps I’m just seeing downstream effects of the reform of health economics in the last decade. Perhaps it’s elite overproduction. In any case reading the featured article, I’m just not at all optimistic about current medical practices experiencing any sort of kuhnian paradigm shift. They can’t even get the basics right, and seem prone to extreme group think bordering on religiosity.
- speakfreely 4y ago
  > Are doctors, as a group, becoming stupider? I don't think they're becoming stupider, but I think the information age is making their errors more accessible and obvious to the general public.
- connicpu 4y ago
  I think as the pool of knowledge balloons exponentially in size it becomes nearly impossible for a doctor to be familiar with all of it, so their only choice is to deeply specialize in one field and limit the breadth of patients they can treat (also becoming less knowledgeable about anything unrelated to their field), or they must be incredibly general and have only surface level knowledge of everything. 100 years ago a few years of study could teach you nearly everything there was to know in the medical field at the time. The expanding pool of knowledge also makes it harder to determine which knowledge is actually helpful to take in. I think this is an area where technology can help. The best primary care providers I've had have been the ones who aren't afraid to look things up as we're talking about them. I think better tools to aggregate the cutting edge of medical knowledge would help greatly.
nikolay 4y ago
This is precisely why I still wear an N95 mask outside of our household - we need decades to learn about a meaningful part of the damage SARS-CoV-2 does to us. A lot of people still consider this to be a form of the seasonal flu, but it's a totally different thing, and the excess deaths are just an early indication that we should be more careful with it. Some blame vaccines for them, it's an acceptable hypothesis, of course, but I doubt it's only that. Having a reinfection every other month is not something we get with the flu!
- TheBlight 4y ago
  If you contract covid will you stop wearing the mask outside?
  - nikolay 4y ago
    Not really unless we have decent antivirals and knowledge - I got used to it. Out of 4 people in my household, 2 had it only once this summer (BA.4 or BA.5) - it was contracted outside on a sunny August day and from a large distance - 20-30 feet from our neighbor, but my son and I wore masks at home and didn't catch it (I trust PCR tests, we've had several). People do stupid things! I observe and wonder how can call us intelligent species! For example, I see the following scenarios: - only some people in a family wear masks in a closed space. - people wear a mask inside but take it off to eat or sometimes talk to others. - people talk in each other face outside, but wear masks inside. - people wear surgical masks without any certification (such as ASTM) and wear the same masks for days (you can tell from how dirty their masks are) - not only they are not protected from COVID-19, but they can bring bacteria, fungi, and microplastics straight into their lungs! I do not participate in circuses - if I do something, I do it properly, and in a meaningful way! XBB.1.5 is as contagious as measles, i.e. it's the most infectious virus known to science! And new variants could go beyond the r0 of measles soon (r0 has only being going up so far)! You cannot act the same way as this is the flu with a much lower basic reproductive number, which is very-well studied, has decent antivirals, yet still kills a lot of people and costs trillion dollars to the global economy each year!
thicTurtlLverXX 4y ago
Ig. It be worth to add that total dental care costs in US are more than $160bln / year (which isn't much less than cancer spending) and my guess would be that 95% of that costs are caused by chronic infections.

heywhatupboys 4y ago

there are literally no peer reviewed scientific study demonstrating the pathology of "long covid". In fact, there aren't really any knowledge that there is such as thing as "long covid" in the way we traditionally define diseases

colechristensen 4y ago
Google long covid ncbi for a long list of papers. I don’t know what you mean with your no true Scotsman fallacy, there’s definitely something and quite a lot of research establishing what. Where did you get your information?
- collyw 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Can you name one biomarker for depression or severe PTSD or bipolar disorder? Do you believe those don't exist either?
    - collyw 4y ago
      The majority of long covid is fake though. It will be suffered by the same hypochondriacs that had gluten intollerance last decade and dust allergies before that. You are are that the definition of long covid is along the lines of "anything that can't be explained that happened after a covid infection" absolute horseshit propagandized by the media. Show me some biomarkers and I'll start paying attention.
      - atombender 4y ago
        How do you know they're hypochondriacs? Are there studies showing long-COVID patients to be hypochondriacs? Or are you a doctor who has examined lots of patients who turn out to be hypochondriacs?
        collyw 4y ago
        Watch the video I linked to, it contains a well designed study that gives good evidence in favor of that hypothesis. You won't though, will you?
        atombender 4y ago
        I watched it and skimmed the paper. I did not see any claim that people are hypochondriacs, nor any evidence for it.
  - Retric 4y ago
ck2 4y ago
There are hundreds of papers on Long Covid, many peer reviewed. Someone on reddit keeps track of them all: https://reddit.com/r/LongHaulResearch https://reddit.com/r/LongHaulResearch also: https://reddit.com/r/COVID19/search/?q=pasc https://reddit.com/r/COVID19/search/?q=pasc

Retric 4y ago

I think you’re underestimating doctors. Viral infections sticking around has been known about for a very long time. Chronic infection of Hepatitis C for example occurs in about 80% of those infected and it can be asymptomatic for years while causing liver etc damage. This includes many viral infections that the general public don’t realize stick around: “The causative agent for shingles is the varicella zoster virus (VZV) – a double-stranded DNA virus related to the herpes simplex virus. Most individuals are infected with this virus as children which causes an episode of chickenpox. The immune system eventually eliminates the virus from most locations, but it remains dormant (or latent) in the ganglia adjacent to the spinal cord (called the dorsal root ganglion) or the trigeminal ganglion in the base of the skull.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles Typhoid marry is a famous example of this behavior occasionally extending to viruses that generally get cleared from the body.

pessimizer 4y ago
Everybody has been aware of hepatitis C, herpes, and chicken pox becoming shingles for decades. I'm pretty sure this discussion is about viruses that we generally don't think of as chronic.
rhacker 4y ago
H. Pylori has been around for 20 years, hundreds of papers written on it. My wife went in and the doctor said - huh, I haven't seen that before I need to go look up how to treat it, I'll be right back. That is, of course, after we did our own GI-MAP and took it to a doctor, not that a doctor would EVER suggest doing that. A naturopath? Yes they do it as a standard. Standard doctors are operating on 1960's textbooks.
- Retric 4y ago
  Doctors are required to keep getting recertification based on current practices, they can’t just regurgitate outdated information. General practitioners refer people to specialists because nobody can keep up with every bit of new research out there. A doctor looking something unusual up isn’t a sign of incompetence but rather best practices.

cjbgkagh 4y ago

Double checking, by ‘EDS’ that wasn’t a typo and you meant Ehlers Danlos Syndrome? I’ve been beating the drum for underdaignosed EDS for a long time. It’s insane how prevent it is in so many statistics and yet doctors still think it’s super rare. I think a huge number of Long Covid people have EDS, way more than the general population, they’re highly disposed to it. It would make sense that a treatment for EDS would help LongCovid and visa versa.

oigursh 4y ago

> we need to find a way to restore gut function that works well and reliably. Microbiota engraftment from faecal transplants _is_ reliable - it brings along a raft of bacteriophages that clear a niche for the incoming colonies - unlike just slinging some probiotics down your neck and hoping some survive.

2devnull 4y ago

“the vast majority of doctors would have any knowledge on today, most would consider it ridiculous despite thousands of papers on this topic with growing evidence” Are doctors, as a group, becoming stupider? I’m not trying to troll by asking that question. I legitimately feel, as a patient of a large HMO, that the doctors I interact with aren’t very bright, making frequent mistakes about stuff they could google as quickly as they give out wrong information, but instead confidently insist upon something they’re misremembering or have never learned correctly in the first place. It feels like the profession has been optimizing for the wrong things: quick recall of a breadth of information rather than a scientific orientation towards the work. Perhaps I’m just seeing downstream effects of the reform of health economics in the last decade. Perhaps it’s elite overproduction. In any case reading the featured article, I’m just not at all optimistic about current medical practices experiencing any sort of kuhnian paradigm shift. They can’t even get the basics right, and seem prone to extreme group think bordering on religiosity.

speakfreely 4y ago
> Are doctors, as a group, becoming stupider? I don't think they're becoming stupider, but I think the information age is making their errors more accessible and obvious to the general public.
connicpu 4y ago
I think as the pool of knowledge balloons exponentially in size it becomes nearly impossible for a doctor to be familiar with all of it, so their only choice is to deeply specialize in one field and limit the breadth of patients they can treat (also becoming less knowledgeable about anything unrelated to their field), or they must be incredibly general and have only surface level knowledge of everything. 100 years ago a few years of study could teach you nearly everything there was to know in the medical field at the time. The expanding pool of knowledge also makes it harder to determine which knowledge is actually helpful to take in. I think this is an area where technology can help. The best primary care providers I've had have been the ones who aren't afraid to look things up as we're talking about them. I think better tools to aggregate the cutting edge of medical knowledge would help greatly.

nikolay 4y ago

This is precisely why I still wear an N95 mask outside of our household - we need decades to learn about a meaningful part of the damage SARS-CoV-2 does to us. A lot of people still consider this to be a form of the seasonal flu, but it's a totally different thing, and the excess deaths are just an early indication that we should be more careful with it. Some blame vaccines for them, it's an acceptable hypothesis, of course, but I doubt it's only that. Having a reinfection every other month is not something we get with the flu!

TheBlight 4y ago
If you contract covid will you stop wearing the mask outside?
- nikolay 4y ago
  Not really unless we have decent antivirals and knowledge - I got used to it. Out of 4 people in my household, 2 had it only once this summer (BA.4 or BA.5) - it was contracted outside on a sunny August day and from a large distance - 20-30 feet from our neighbor, but my son and I wore masks at home and didn't catch it (I trust PCR tests, we've had several). People do stupid things! I observe and wonder how can call us intelligent species! For example, I see the following scenarios: - only some people in a family wear masks in a closed space. - people wear a mask inside but take it off to eat or sometimes talk to others. - people talk in each other face outside, but wear masks inside. - people wear surgical masks without any certification (such as ASTM) and wear the same masks for days (you can tell from how dirty their masks are) - not only they are not protected from COVID-19, but they can bring bacteria, fungi, and microplastics straight into their lungs! I do not participate in circuses - if I do something, I do it properly, and in a meaningful way! XBB.1.5 is as contagious as measles, i.e. it's the most infectious virus known to science! And new variants could go beyond the r0 of measles soon (r0 has only being going up so far)! You cannot act the same way as this is the flu with a much lower basic reproductive number, which is very-well studied, has decent antivirals, yet still kills a lot of people and costs trillion dollars to the global economy each year!

thicTurtlLverXX 4y ago

Ig. It be worth to add that total dental care costs in US are more than $160bln / year (which isn't much less than cancer spending) and my guess would be that 95% of that costs are caused by chronic infections.