Review An Unwanted but Long-Known Company: Post-Viral Symptoms in the Context of Past Pandemics in Switzerland (and Beyond), 2024, Staub

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https://www.ssph-journal.org/articles/10.3389/phrs.2024.1606966/full

An Unwanted but Long-Known Company: Post-Viral Symptoms in the Context of Past Pandemics in Switzerland (and Beyond)

REVIEW
Public Health Rev, 08 April 2024
Volume 45 - 2024 | https://doi.org/10.3389/phrs.2024.1606966
Kaspar Staub1,2* Tala Ballouz3 Milo Puhan2,3

• 1Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
• 2Swiss School of Public Health, Zurich, Switzerland
• 3Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Objectives:

Some people do not fully recover from an acute viral infection and experience persistent symptoms or incomplete recovery for months or even years. This is not unique to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and history shows that post-viral conditions like post COVID-19 condition, also referred to as Long Covid, are not new. In particular, during and after pandemics caused by respiratory viruses in which large parts of the population were infected or exposed, professional and public attention was increased, not least because of the large number of people affected.

Methods:

Given the current relevance of the topic, this article aims to narratively review and summarize the literature on post-viral symptoms during past pandemics and to supplement and illustrate it with Swiss examples from the pandemics of 1890, 1918–1920 and later.

Results:

Post-viral diseases were an increasingly emphasised health topic during and after past pandemics triggered by respiratory infections over the last 150 years.

Conclusion:

In the next pandemic, it should not be surprising that post-viral conditions will again play a role, and pandemic plans should reflect this.

 

Good paper, thanks Tom. It is interesting to notice that they mention encephalitis lethargica in the review. It is a neurological illness that appeared in several epidemics during the first decades of the 1900s. The lethality was alarming, several tens of percent, and many patients were severely debilitated after the acute phase. The epidemics stopped in the second half of the 1900s for unknown reasons, but there are still endemic cases. The aetiology is not well understood—I don't think it has been conclusively demonstrated that it is an infection. This illness is an illustrative example of the problem with arguments of ignorance. It has all the criteria for being labelled “functional” or “medically unexplained”: a) the aetiology and pathogenesis are not understood, b) there is no diagnostic test, and c) the illness mysteriously appeared and disappeared. Because of the high mortality, the BPS proponents have abstained from adding this illness to their turf.

 

Mentions in 2 places but largely ignores the giant ME/CFS elephant in the room. So still a very superficial effort that puts too much emphasis on old events and mostly frames it as an issue during epidemics, ignoring that this happens all the time, just at a lower level. Or that COVID will continue to have high prevalence while most LC comes from mild acute cases.

Doesn't get much better than a C given this.