When I read media reports in Switzerland, I always notice the huge discrepancy compared to Germany. While in Germany, M.E. is almost always mentioned when discussing “Long Covid,” in Switzerland it’s only ever touched on very briefly. Instead, every report emphasizes multiple times that most people recover from “Long Covid”—so as not to give people the impression that it’s something common or serious.
Long Covid: Bessere Forschung, aber immer noch viele Betroffene
Hunderttausende leiden in der Schweiz an Long Covid. Eine wirksame Therapie fehlt bis heute, trotz besserer Forschung.www.srf.ch
News from Austria and Switzerland
- Thread starter MSEsperanza
- Start date
I completely understand where you’re coming from—when discussions around recovery rates or prognoses pop up, it can very easily sound like the implication is "if you haven't recovered, you did something wrong," which can feel invalidating and painful when you are seriously ill for a long time and have plateaued.
I don't feel that these recent articles—especially the one I linked—are trying to suggest that recovery is the expected or normal path for LC or ME/CFS. Rather, it seems like a long-overdue correction toward acknowledging that there is a wide spectrum of outcomes.
What ME/CFS specialists and patients have long pointed to are general statistical trends: factors like earlier diagnosis, immediate exertion management, or younger age can improve the odds of stabilization or improvement. But these are just population statistics—they aren't guarantees, and they certainly don't mean that anyone living with severe illness failed to pace properly or missed a window.
(On a side note regarding why coverage looks the way it does in Switzerland: LC gets far more media presence than ME/CFS primarily because Chantal Britt, Switzerland's main LC advocate, has a background as a journalist.)
When I first read the article, I shared that disappointment—it’s frustrating to see how little progress is being made here, especially when the recent wave of BPS reframed as "neuroplasticity" seems to get so much uncritical media coverage.
That said, my main positive takeaway was learning about Dr. Christian von Plessen in Lausanne. Having Switzerland's first university hospital ME/CFS specialist who isn't a psychiatrist feels like a genuinely meaningful step in the right direction.
That said, my main positive takeaway was learning about Dr. Christian von Plessen in Lausanne. Having Switzerland's first university hospital ME/CFS specialist who isn't a psychiatrist feels like a genuinely meaningful step in the right direction.
I think you possibly misunderstood what I meant here. This article certainly doesn't feel like blaming anyone for not recovering. I wanted to emphasize that many articles in Switzerland about Long Covid read like they are written more to reassure the public that the situation isn't that bad and less to lay the focus on those still affected, the inadequacy of their care, the lack of research and that something must be done to improve this situation.
And regarding Chantal Britt, she really frequently talks about M.E. in her public statements and interviews, she also stated having mild M.E. herself. So while you maybe could argue with that when explaining why there are more articles about Long Covid than ME, I think the fact that ME is hardly or just very briefly mentioned inside these Long Covid articles in Switzerland has little to do with her personally.
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It would be nice if he would be the first ME specialist at a University hospital in Switzerland who's not a psychiatrist, but I am not so sure if he is. He is a pulmonologist and the director for Long Covid consultations at CHUV, but I couldn't find him mentioning ME anywhere when I looked him up. So I am really unsure if he really is a specialist for ME or just a specialist for Long/Post Covid who doesn't specifically mention ME, like Dr. Hund-Georgiadis at Rehab Basel or Dr Weber at Waidspital Zurich.
Yann04
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
And yet, Swiss media is unfathomably better than it was 4-5 years ago on this subject. Germany/Austria are just honestly probably the best in the world right now.
Yann04
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Pulmonologist doesn’t sound particularly encouraging as I’d imagine it takes a “shortness of breath”/“lung damage” focus on Post-COVID.
FWIW my experience at the long COVID clinic in CHUV in 2023 was not good, cough “Long COVID Specialist” who believed all ME/CFS = FND cough.
Jonathan Edwards
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I think they do, as they do with post-EBV fatigue. Both are common but not serious for most. I wouldn't talk of M.E. anyway. I think mentioning ME/CFS makes sense but it is not entirely clear even now that Covid has changed the number of people with ME/CFS. Almost everyone has had Covid now and going about normal social activities I do not detect any sudden increase in the number of people with ME/CFS as such. For the few who developed ME/CFS after Covid that may seem dismissive but what matter are the figures.
Chandelier
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
That’s interesting.
The German society for ME/CFS mentions a doubling of incidence:
So does the Interdisciplinary, collaborative D-A-CH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) consensus statement:
And the ME/CFS Research analysis talks about rising costs for ME/CFS.
From a Spiegel article:
I‘m not saying that you’re wrong, I just notice that the incidence doubling narrative is pretty prevalent, at least in Germany.
Jonathan Edwards
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
But such a 'doubling' would be totally unsurprising if diagnostic ascertainment had shifted a bit - which it will have done in any country where there is a debate about this.
Diagnostic criteria are always a pragmatic trade off in terms of separating groups of people in a context of other disease prevalences and a whole range of psychosocial factors. (This is where psychosocial factors really do matter - how many GPs have heard of the diagnosis etc.) If the prevalence of an alternative diagnosis shifts then your diagnostic criteria may no longer be ideal. If post-viral fatigue suddenly affected 25% of the population in a year - which I would believe for post-Covid, then we probably have to re-write diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS in that context.
Peter T
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I also thought I had seen it said that the incidence in the UK has doubled following the pandemic, though I no idea now where that was.
The MEA talk in their 2025 booklet of a 62% increase in prevelance compared to historical figures, but I don’t know if they distinguished between an impact of Covid and newer approaches to how the figure is estimated.
Chandelier
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I couldn’t find anything about the UK specifically, but this US-based study claims:
RECOVER study finds COVID-19 increases risk of developing ME/CFS
RECOVER researchers found that people were more likely to develop myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) after having COVID-19. Most of the people who developed ME/CFS also developed Long COVID.
I can understand that, with its focus on high recovery rates for Long Covid, the article might seem at first glance to downplay Long Covid and ME/CFS and reassure the general public that it is not an urgent health problem.
However, if you take into account that voices claiming these illnesses are psychosomatic and can be overcome with brain training have recently grown louder in Swiss media, there is good reason to read this piece quite differently: as a targeted, strategic pushback against BPS models and an argument for a somatic understanding of LC and ME/CFS.
In my opinion, the most important message for the Swiss public is the paragraph in the middle of the article. There, the new head of the Long Covid clinic at Unisanté in Lausanne—de facto the top Swiss Long Covid specialist as the only physician at a university hospital setting—is quoted with a short, clear statement: Long Covid is unambiguously a somatic disease. Psychosomatic explanatory models are to be firmly rejected, as biomedical scientific evidence is now available.
This is contrasted with the note that the website of the BAG (health ministry) has not been updated in two years—meaning the topic has politically gone to sleep in Switzerland, even though so many patients remain ill and lack adequate support.
I consider this to be a very cleverly written article that meets the general public where it currently stands, only to then deliver one single, clear message in a targeted way: patients suffering from a serious physical illness are underserved, and politically, hardly anything is being done. To me, this seems like a very sober, objective description of the current situation in Switzerland.
An interesting detail on the side: The article was published on Sunday shortly before the end of the Tour de France Femmes, so the two topics—at least through editorial logic and personalization—were placed right next to each other. Marlen Reusser is currently the most prominent person affected by LC in Switzerland, after recently explaining in a lengthy SRF interview how she allegedly overcame her illness using self-hypnosis and working on unconscious dysregulations. The fact that this clarifying article appears right now feels like a deliberate editorial decision by SRF: giving the many thousands of people who visited the website for Reusser finishing the Tour an immediate scientific correction to the BPS narrative.
(Translated from German with Gemini)
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They now included something about ME, it's a NANO documentation that's called "ME/CFS endlessly tired" and begins of course with a recovery story and, between scientists like Dr. Scheibenbogen speculating about the causes of ME, when talking about treatment has multiple "experts" talking about how important it is not to become too passive with ME/CFS and to gradually increase activity
https://www.srf.ch/news/dialog/long-covid-das-zaehe-leiden-geht-fuer-viele-patienten-weiter
Also maybe interesting to mention and for comparison, this article seems to be a shortened version of the one that was published on RTS, national television for the french speaking part of Switzerland. The article there isn't just much longer but also written with much more urgency and emphasis on Long Covid being serious and surely not psychosomatik, e.g. they begin with the story of Samuel from Austria who died with assisted suicide.
Here the article from RTS:
https://www.rts.ch/info/sante/2026/...nnent-les-malades-du-covid-long-29290579.html
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Do we have a thread on here to discuss the prevalence of ME in general? With a brief search I didn't really find one. I know it's difficult to have reliable numbers on this because especially in the past you had a) people with a 'CFS' diagnoses who didn't really fullfil the criteria and b) at the same time probably many people with ME who stayed undiagnosed for years.
I'd love to discuss this a bit more, as apart from the doubling narrative for me the calculations by the Research Foundation in Germany seem a bit far-fetched and rather on the high side.
Yann04
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I’m sure there’s a more recent one but this one should do:
Felis Catus
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
If the prevalence of a disease went from 0.5% to 1%, i.e. doubled, would people going about their life notice it, though?
NelliePledge
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I remember when the first medications for Alzheimer’s came in all of a sudden dementia stopped getting swept under the carpet and was actually being given as a diagnosis because it was higher profile.
Chandelier
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Nach der Tour der France - Reusser: Enttäuscht, frustriert – und vor allem ratlos
Marlen Reusser fiel auf der letzten Etappe noch vom Tour-Podest. Eine Erklärung dafür hat sie nicht.
With Reusser I never know what to feel: Anger for being a BPS model super spreader. Envy and sympathetic joy that she's recovered. Fear that she's going to relapse and end up on disabililty.
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