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

[Dolphin]

Free full text:
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.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1778962414878281731

 

[Obermann]

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.

 

[Hutan]

Yes, interesting, and useful if you want to cite a reference on the importance of understanding post-infection diseases.
For example:

Pandemics will very likely continue to happen, and in the next pandemic, it should come as no surprise if post-viral diseases play a role again. In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of considering the post-acute phase also in future pandemic preparedness. This includes investing in research to further understand these conditions, planning and allocating resources to enhance post-infectious care such as the development of multidisciplinary clinics or through self- management platforms (e.g., Altea Network in Switzerland or Your Covid Recovery in the UK), implementing policies to support affected individuals to return to work or school, and developing systematic assessments and documentation to aid in social insurance and assistance when necessary (e.g., EPOCA tool of Swiss Insurance Medicine [70, 71]). Taking the lessons we learned from COVID-19 and incorporating them into our pandemic preparedness plans will be extremely crucial in reducing the long- term impacts of future pandemics on individuals and societies worldwide.

I'm not so keen on some of those supposed advances 'Your Covid Recovery' in the UK. It could be worth finding out more about the 'EPOCA tool of Swiss Insurance Medicine' for assessing and documenting for social insurance.

 

[Hutan]

It could be worth finding out more about the 'EPOCA tool of Swiss Insurance Medicine' for assessing and documenting for social insurance.

It was interesting to read yannlk's post on another thread about the situation in Switzerland, just after writing the above on the Swiss Insurance Medicine - I've copied yank's post here:

What the Long Covid clinics do is whenever they see someone severly affected by long covid, they give them an ME/CFS diagnosis, refuse to diagnose long covid, and tell the patient that they will need to find help elsewhere.

I can see three reasons for this:
1. The long covid clinics are overwhelmed and will do anything to discharge patients.
2. The doctors believe/are feeding the belief that long covid is something temporary that doesn’t affect people severly and are removing anyone who poses opposite evidence to this.
3. In switzetland you cannot get Disability insurance for ME/CFS but you can for long covid, this covert policy, whether on purpose or not is saving the government tens of millions a year.

I wonder if this paper can help to rectify that problem.

 

[rvallee]

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.