Nature news feature: Long COVID is a double curse in low-income nations — here’s why

SNT Gatchaman

SNT Gatchaman

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Long COVID is a double curse in low-income nations — here’s why

Not only is the prevalence of the condition poorly understood, but it’s also often ignored by physicians and the wider public.

LMICs — a heterogeneous collection of more than 130 nations — face even more challenges. Many have been undermined economically by a legacy of colonialism and exploitation. Health-care systems vary widely among these countries, but resources are strained in many of them relative to wealthier countries. [...] In Brazil, for example, more than one-third of all workers are informally employed, meaning that there is no systematic way to track how many days of work people miss due to illness.
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“People are quietly dropping out of society,” says Emma-Louise Aveling, a global public-health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, who has interviewed health-care workers and people with long COVID in Brazil for her research.
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The risk of the condition might be influenced by genetic and environmental factors, says Olufemi Erinoso, a public-health researcher at the University of Nevada in Reno, who has studied long COVID in Lagos, Nigeria. “We need to have a global approach to the disease to understand how genetics might affect the outcomes.”
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To really grasp the mechanism of long COVID, researchers need study participants with diverse genetic backgrounds so that they can work out which cellular pathways are involved and how they might vary in different people. And the more researchers know about those pathways, the more potential targets they’ll have for medicines to treat long COVID. “Not being able to approach the disease in a global, concerted effort is a major impediment to a better understanding and a better therapy for everyone,” says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
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Similar conditions can follow after other viral infections, including some tropical diseases. These have long been neglected, says anthropologist Jean Segata at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, particularly when they affect marginalized communities. “Often, these patients complain that they are not taken seriously by doctors, who tell them it’s nothing and that it will pass soon,” he says. “The lack of recognition for their suffering becomes an additional source of frustration and distress for long-COVID patients in impoverished countries.”
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It's heartening to see a developing view of viruses as having the potential to cause long-term or permanent injury. This has been understood with some illnesses, but the destructive or injurious effects of COVID and also EBV have been dismissed by most of the medical system.

Also important, as the article says is to create a global understanding of Long COVID.
 
There are multiple elements

An individuals own financial resources

family financial resources and relationship or lack of one with family

Whether there is any effective social or health safety net where you live, If there is any provision do you have access to it
 
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