Former science reporter at The Washington Post and elsewhere. Disabled by complex chronic post-viral illness. Living on #Kauai#Hawaii. Grew up in Wisconsin. Occasional SCUBA diver.
Innovative Chinese study that looked at tissue samples from people infected by SARS-CoV-2 finds association between viral persistence and #LongCovid. Although the definition of long covid they used seems to be fairly loose.
@TexasObserver Good article but no need to call long covid mysterious. About half of cases qualify for a diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, and most og the rest can be classified by damage to specific organs, lungs, heart etc.
Gift link to a good article on a jump in diagnoses of an autonomic nervous system disorder among young women especially, after COVID. It's called POTS, I developed it too after a viral infection and you definitely do not want it.
It's very much a part of the suite of awful things that can happen with #LongCovid.
Physicist Peter Higgs has died. He theorized the subatomic particle that gives mass to matter. One of the great joys of my career was waking up at 3am on July 4, 2012, to report on the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Smiling at my $40 monthly electric bill here in Hawaii, where rates are the highest in the nation.
With rooftop PV, my electricity has negative cost during the day - I run dishwasher & washer/dryer when the sun is out, and the excess gets sold back to Kauai's utility co-op. So I only pay for power at night.
"Beth's work must continue..." a message from Laurie Jones, exec dir. of patient advocacy group ME Action, which was co-founded my late partner Beth Mazur.
Laurie bore a daughter shortly after Beth died and named her Georgina Beth - a beautiful tribute.
Thanks to Tanya Lewis & Josh Fischman for interviewing me for this SciAm #podcast on the recent publication of an NIH study on myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome that I volunteered for.
We warned everyone back in spring of 2020 that this would happen if the pandemic was not kept under control.
I think the very broad definition of long covid used here is inflating numbers of people who are disabled...but no doubt many are & many more are less productive than before infection.
Ignoring post-viral illness continues to fuck us all up.
Interesting #news biz item: I just sent some photos to CNN for them to use in a story and they asked me to certify that the photos were not generated with #AI.
Today is the 2 month anniversary of the death of my partner, Beth Mazur, and it's also the publication day of an NIH study on ME/CFS that I took part in as a patient & that Beth was involved with as an advocate. She supported me during the 21 days I was at the Clinical Center & pushed the scientists to work faster & do better. I'm very happy reporter Jennifer Couzin-Frankel mentions Beth in her #Science article today.
In 2017 I was an inpatient at the NIH for their first on-campus study of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome in 30 years.
The study is being published next week...7 years later.
The researchers were thorough & dedicated but the study was so ambitious that it was under-resourced. They cast a wide net w/ many tests & technologies to generate hypotheses. I spent 21 nights at the Clinical Center over two visits.
I've read a draft. It reconfirms previous findings, pushes back on pervasive medical misinformation & reports a few things that, to my eye, look new. But I don't think there's anything really earth-shattering in there. The researchers have come up with an overarching hypothesis for the illness, but they're doing so based on 17 patients...so that's a little dicey.
Now NIH has to follow through with clinical trials. The paper has some ideas for drugs to try. They need to do so.
