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HHS’s Long COVID Office Is Closing. What Will This Mean for Future Research and Treatments?
(www.scientificamerican.com)
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This is heartbreaking enough for those who became chronically ill during covid. But LC is (almost certainly) a subset of myalgic encephalomyelitus (ME/CFS or ME,) an illness that has reduced a great many formerly active people to mere shadows of our former selves. People can live for DECADES feeling like shit, hardly able to get out of bed. Doctors have dismissed us and told us our suffering is all in our minds.
As covid-19 began, we ME/CFS folks knew what would happen. We were going to be joined by a huge new cohort of this sad club that nobody wants to join. As terrible as the prospect was, the silver lining was that it offered a hope that our illness would finally be taken seriously. With so many newly disabled people, surely research money would flow! We dared to hope that at least we might all benefit from the medical breakthroughs that could result. But no. Once again heartless, unscrupulous people would rather let millions rot than allow government and science to help us.
The dusty exposed have been dropping like flies with ME/CFS for ever and a day.
The community has been calling on governments to recognise, research and act for very many years .
During one government hearing (Which actually became two hearings due to the COVID outbreak) the similarities between long COVID and dust induced autoimmune diseases were well noted and published in the final report, but calls for further research were only to be ignored once again.
As one specialist research doctor explained some years ago (Long before COVID)..The reason we were fighting a losing battle for research and recognition with governments was that such conditions could also be triggered by many chemicals and even air pollution, therefore if they recognised one agent as causative then they would be forced to admit to all the others .
So yip, dusty guys are very much aware of how desperately research into these conditions is required and also how the system works.
Oh dear. Every time I think I've finally achieved the correct degree of cynicism, another evil like this raises a fin, and I have to recalibrate again. I really hadn't put that together about the money and the poison. Makes total sense, though.