MIT Technology Review: Tackling long-haul diseases

SNT Gatchaman

SNT Gatchaman

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https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/28/1087617/tackling-long-haul-diseases

In 2020, the pandemic slammed the brakes on most in-person research at Stanford, including Tal’s Lyme studies, and she switched to investigating the salivary immune response to covid. As soon as vaccines were in clinical trials, she shifted to studying the mucosal response to covid vaccines. Meanwhile, reports began emerging that many covid patients never recovered from their acute infections, continuing to face an array of bewildering symptoms ranging from shortness of breath to crushing fatigue and cognitive deficits.
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For Tal, the similarities with Lyme disease were uncanny. “Long covid looks exactly, and I mean exactly, like chronic Lyme,” she says. “One is caused by bacteria, and one is caused by a virus. And I started to ask myself this question: Does it matter which road you took to Rome? Or does it only matter that you’re in Rome?”
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"For Tal, the similarities with Lyme disease were uncanny. “Long covid looks exactly, and I mean exactly, like chronic Lyme,” she says. “One is caused by bacteria, and one is caused by a virus. And I started to ask myself this question: Does it matter which road you took to Rome? Or does it only matter that you’re in Rome?”

"This is one of the most fundamental questions facing researchers who study infection-mediated chronic illness. One school of thought—backed by increasing evidence in the case of long covid—holds that stubbornly persistent pathogens are driving symptoms in at least a portion of the patient population. According to another hypothesis, the immune system has successfully vanquished the infection but remains stuck in a faulty state. Determining the underlying cause of these conditions will be essential to developing the most effective treatments, whether in the form of immune-assisting drugs such as antibiotics and antivirals or immune-calming drugs such as biologic therapies and steroids."

Evidently they are using some form of AI platform to help in the analysis.
 
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