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Herd immunity is a worrying concept. It only works in diseases that give long term immunity and do not mutate much but colds don't fit that very well. Years ago I read that the problem with the highly populated cities we live in is that a virus infects everyone living in one place then spreads...

They drop virus into tissue culture all the time and it manages to replicate. Also viruses have been around for, what is it, billions of years? Yet consciousness and thoughts only for a few million and only in one species. Plants get infected by viruses and bacteria, as do fish, frogs, fungi...

It may be that this is looking at viable virus. The original work only looked at the presence of virus no if it was infectious. This is a link in which the original researchers talk about their work...

This is one of those studies which only looks at numbers so tells us nothing. Dry eyes are a symptom just like fatigue or cough, it is such a wide category it tells us nothing. Dry eyes were seen as just a problem that women had after the menopause so no one cared very much. In a similar way to...

Neurasthenia was thought to be caused by the experience of "modern living" in the cities of the 1800s which people were thought to be bad for the nerves. This was particularly true of the delicate physiologies of women who were often not allowed to read newspapers in case it overloaded their...

Possibly because participants from both were away with the fairies.

This thread made me think about why we recover from other virus infections so quickly. It must be because what we think of as, say, a cold is actually the immune system's response to the infection. Because we already have antibodies to the virus or a similar one we soon have a runny nose and...

All this about patients not recovering quickly is confusing me. After a severe body damaging infection like covid 19, why would anyone expect people to recover quickly? If the lungs and vascular system are ravaged so they do not work properly the body needs to fix that even if the virus is...

When I studied microbiology in the early 70s, it was accepted as fact that some infections could take a long time to recover from, two or three years in some cases. Flu, especially was considered to have a long time to resolve in some patients. This was different from ME which was a separate...

I am very reluctant to start going out again even if the lockdown is lifted but not because of any but because the virus has not gone away, the epidemic is not over and there is still no treatment. The lockdown gave us time to get measures in place to cope, nothing more. Social distancing...

I have been thinking about the post covid 19 problems. Dr Paul Cheney spoke about his heart transplant though I can't remember the ME context. He said that as soon as they gave him a new heart he was cured but it took him almost a year to feel back to normal because his body had to recover from...

If your health is really bad all the time then you will not be able to see a delay before you get ill though it might be possible to detect if we had better tools. So not having the delay before feeling any ill effects does not rule out ME but having the delay is the only thing which can...

The smallest exertion leading to relapse is not PEM as unique to ME. It is post exertional fatigue, as seen in post viral syndromes. If it is like normal post flu they will have the same thing happen with much the same amount of exertion whereas in ME you can be fine one day then another not...

The way even experts don't seem to know what we get is infuriating. Listen to us! We get all the same symptoms of fatigue and post exertional problems that other illnesses do, for the same reasons. We are seriously ill and our bodies struggle all the time. But the unique thing about ME is all...

35 years of reading the literature and I have never heard of this :)

Jon Stone has now taken the MUS out of neurology by giving it the "robust" diagnosis of functional neurological disorder. He calls the category robust because looking at patients after 4 or so years they were still diagnosed as FND. But deciding that someone's seizures are caused by demonic...

In Scotland, the emphasis is on cloth face coverings, not face masks. The use of language is trivial but it gets rid of the argument that it will take protective equipment from those who need it so it is worth making the distinction all the time. When the lockdown begins to be relaxed the...

Actually, the answer would be enterovirus but we don't talk about those. (also an RNA virus)

I just want to say that nobody ever tried to replicate this. The study was dismissed by SW because his study found depression was more likely because his percentage was higher than Behan's number for abnormal mitochondria. That was about the time research into ME stopped in the UK and the US...

In the epidemics it was active people who became ill, staff, not patients and in a teaching college the students became ill, the nuns did not. Since the disease was prevalent among medical staff, teachers and mothers of young children (fathers did not do much child rearing in those days!) the...