News from the USA, United States of America

Dakota15 said:
"..that's the question and the debate right now...is it a protracted immune response to a virus or pathogen...other people think it's an infection continuing that's just not being caught...that's part of what researchers are looking into and trying to understand..."
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I wonder if they've any idea, at all, how many times these questions have been asked and investigated.

I keep seeing my mam's eye-roll when some perverse style came back into fashion for the fifth time in her life, and everybody thought they were the first to wear it.
 
CBS News: “NAIAD Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo gives update on COVID-19 concerns”

“..the long-lasting effects of infection can be really devastating and debilitating to some people, so we need to figure that out.” said Dr. Marrazzo

“As new COVID-19 strains develop, Dr. Marrazzo said data has shown symptoms of Long-COVID such as respiratory and neurological effects are a concern regarding the virus.”
 
1. The Story Exchange: 'Jill Biden Announces $500 Million Investment Into Military Women’s Health'

'Other health conditions that solely, or disproportionately, impact women – yet receive minimal research funding – include endometriosis, RA and chronic fatigue syndrome'

'The money will largely support research into health conditions that disproportionately impact enlisted women, veterans and their families.'

2. UPI: "Jill Biden: Pentagon to invest $500M annually into women's health research"

'She explained that the money will go toward studying arthritis, chronic fatigue and cardiovascular health'

"We're going to get moving on this”

3. Task & Purpose: 'Pentagon to invest $500 million to study health issues affecting servicewomen'

'The program will fund $500 million in Pentagon research on topics like rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue, eating disorders, and gynecological cancers'

4. Women's Agenda: 'Jill Biden announces $731 million investment into women’s health'

'The initiative will contribute to the research of medical issues that disproportionately affect women in military service, such as ovarian cancer, RA, chronic fatigue..'

5. "Jill Biden announces $500 million for women's health research"

"This money is going to study arthritis and chronic fatigue and cardiovascular health -- it's a big deal, and it's about time," added the 73-year-old, who spoke alongside Chelsea Clinton..
 
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Free COVID tests are back. Here's how to order a test to your home
Americans can once again order free COVID-19 tests sent straight to their homes.

The U.S. government reopened the program on Thursday, allowing any household to order up to four at-home COVID nasal swab kits through the website, covidtests.gov. The tests will begin shipping, via the United States Postal Service, as soon as next week.

The website has been reopened on the heels of a summer COVID-19 virus wave and heading into the fall and winter respiratory virus season, with health officials urging Americans to get an updated COVID-19 booster and their yearly flu shot.

U.S. regulators approved an updated COVID-19 vaccine that is designed to combat the recent virus strains and, they hope, forthcoming winter ones, too. Vaccine uptake is waning, however. Most Americans have some immunity from prior infections or vaccinations, but under a quarter of U.S. adults took last fall’s COVID-19 shot.
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Free COVID tests are back. Here's how to order a test to your home (msn.com)
 
Mother Jones: 'Rep. Ilhan Omar to Introduce Major Long Covid Bill'

'The Long Covid Research Moonshot Act would earmark $10 billion to fight the condition'

'On Friday, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) will introduce a potentially groundbreaking piece of federal legislation in the House of Representatives—one allocating $10 billion in funding to fight Long Covid'

“Long Covid is a silent health crisis impacting over twenty-three million Americans, including one million children,” Omar said in a statement to Mother Jones. “I’m proud to lead this effort in the House to recognize Long Covid as the public health emergency that it is and invest in countering the effects of this terrible disease.”

'Long Covid symptoms often include debilitating fatigue, and many people found to have it have also been diagnosed with conditions like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. ME/CFS, which is characterized by post-exertional malaise..'

'The Long Covid Research Moonshot Act would establish a new research program within the National Institutes of Health to better understand the condition (and others, like ME/CFS and POTS) with its own database, advisory board, and a new grant process to accelerate clinical trials. '

“We must take bold action to help Americans suffering from Long Covid,” Omar said in her statement.


 
Solve ME: “Solve’s Advocacy Paves Way for ME/CFS Research in $500M Women’s Health Funding”

“We are thrilled to see our persistent advocacy efforts bear fruit…which specifically includes ME/CFS under its ‘chronic fatigue’ designation..” - Emily Taylor

“This announcement is not just a win for our community but a powerful step towards ensuring that infection-associated chronic conditions like ME/CFS receive the attention they deserve. This new funding will open the door to groundbreaking research and much-needed innovation for the millions of people suffering from these conditions.”
 
KQED: “Bay Area's Long COVID Community Celebrates Moonshot Bill for $10 Billion in Funding”

“Long COVID patients and advocates in the Bay Area have spent years pushing for a concerted effort toward research, prevention and a cure.”

“It really shows that this bill has broad support — as it should — because it’s aiming to address the crisis of long COVID in a way that puts the resources that are necessary behind it,” McCorkell said.

“The symptoms of long COVID often include brain fog and fatigue. Many people found to have it have also been diagnosed with conditions like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome(ME/CF) and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). These chronic, complex immune diseases can profoundly limit the wellness and productivity of patients and, like long COVID, are often triggered by an infection.”
 
NJEM, 9/11/24: “What Exactly is Long COVID?”

Excerpts:

“Long COVID needs to be in the discussion, the everyday discussion for physicians, for medical professionals, for researchers, for our government. We need to understand that this is a public health crisis”

“I think the biggest problem is that medical providers are not engaged in long COVID. It's not on their radar. Like, the amount of money they have put into research for long COVID is like spitting in the ocean”

“My name is Dr. Sue Miller. I am 51 years old, and I have had long COVID since my only COVID infection, which was in May of 2022.…my energy level never recovered. I was having headaches and terrible fatigue, and I would forget things I was a practicing neonatologist at a community hospital, and the thing I noticed when I went back to work was that I couldn't multitask. And my job is one big multitask.”

“I started to feel so ill that I went back to the doctor, and I wasn't getting any results. The doctor took blood work, were always telling me basically that's a lot of symptoms, and it doesn't sound like you actually have a specific illness. I felt that they imply many a times a lot of it may be in your head. And they would tell me something like, you could lose weight, you could eat better, you could start exercising. And I walked daily for years. And after having COVID, I cannot do that. I still can't.”

“I was an extremely high-functioning, athletic, smart, overachieving person. So I would take call for 24 hours, I'd go home and run six miles. Cooked my family dinner, walked the dogs, read books, and all of a sudden, I couldn't do any of that."

"My whole life, I wanted to be a physician. I was at the peak of my career, and I lost all of that because of a virus.”

“I saw my internist. She ordered a bunch of basic labs and an MRI of my brain. And all of that came back normal. She had no idea what was going on with me. She said that there's nothing that she can do. All she could offer me was a hug. And now, two years later, I realize that that's really common. Most doctors, they don't know anything about long COVID.”

"And he said to me, yeah, you probably know more about that than I do. So me, the brain-injured neonatologist, knows more about how long COVID affects the brain than the neurologist, who is a specialist in the brain.”

“After I was diagnosed with COVID long-callers, I applied for the state disability. And I got rejected. No long information, just that we don't feel you're disabled at this time.”
 
Boston Globe: 'For COVID ‘long haulers,’ glimmers of good news'

'Exercise physiologist Dr. David Systrom has worked with other researchers to unravel some of the mysteries of long COVID...'

'The study grew out of his experiences with patients: Prior to the arrival of COVID-19, Systrom, a critical care physician who runs a pulmonary clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, had spent years studying chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, an illness afflicting more than 3 million Americans. When Systrom saw his first long COVID patients — before the condition even had a name — he recognized their symptoms immediately. They were similar if not identical to those reported by patients with chronic fatigue.'

'A growing body of research suggests that both long COVID and chronic fatigue are post-viral syndromes that result in chronic, low-grade inflammation that can damage healthy tissue and, in some cases, the production of auto-antibodies that can attack it.
Systrom and others have begun to catalog the scope of the microscopic carnage caused by the immune system’s friendly fire.'
 
Nature, 10/2/24: 'How long COVID could lift the fog on neurocognitive disorders' by Michael Peluso & Wesley Ely

'Insights from a new critical mass of patients are proving invaluable'

'We hope that this and similar work will open the door for studies of other infection-associated chronic conditions, including myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and post-treatment Lyme disease.'

'Much remains unknown about how long COVID develops and can be treated, but research on the interplay between our immune and nervous systems could provide clues.'

'This line of research could have major implications for autoimmune diseases, in general, and neuro-inflammatory conditions, in particular.'

'Funding organizations are beginning to respond. Beyond the NIH’s US$1.15 billion RECOVER initiative to support long-COVID research, institutes within the NIH are increasingly supporting studies of neurologic long COVID...It is crucial that we do not lose momentum.'
 
KSL: “1 in 12 Utahns suffers from long COVID, health department study says”

“Personal stories from Utahns suffering from long COVID illustrate its profound impact affecting their daily life and mental health”

“As he pushed himself each day, it would take a large toll on his body — something called post exertion malaise — and he could not recover. That led him to lash out at his family..eventually his principal stopped by his house..told him he needed to go on disability & stop working."

"My life is completely different than I thought it would ever be," he said Wednesday at an event announcing a new long COVID study."

"About one out of every 12 Utahns is experiencing long COVID and facing the physical, mental, emotional and financial impacts that can arise. There is a significant unmet need to acknowledge and support these patients and their caregivers," the report says.
 
2/8/21, "Pull Up a Chair with Dr. Freire: The COVID Conversations: Interview with Dr. Janet Woodcock" (Former FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner until Feb 2024)

Woodcock: "NIH is starting natural history trials on this, the so-called long haulers, what we call post-viral syndromes. Now, we've always seen people who've had a virus illness. They were perfectly well. They were maybe marathon runners or whatever. They got this virus illness. And then afterward, after they recovered from the virus, they remained terribly sick and with all kinds of problems. And these are called post-viral syndromes. There might be several types of things going on. Many of them, though, are probably related to an immune response that kind of went wrong, right? Yeah, but we don't know. Maybe some of them still have the virus. So we need to look into that very carefully, and then we need to think about treatments for those people too.”
 
Dr Woodcock said:
Now, we've always seen people who've had a virus illness. They were perfectly well. They were maybe marathon runners or whatever. They got this virus illness. And then afterward, after they recovered from the virus, they remained terribly sick and with all kinds of problems. And these are called post-viral syndromes. There might be several types of things going on. Many of them, though, are probably related to an immune response that kind of went wrong, right? Yeah, but we don't know. Maybe some of them still have the virus. So we need to look into that very carefully, and then we need to think about treatments for those people too.
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They could have said all that 100 years ago.
 
5/23/22, ‘From Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval: Dr. Walter Koroshetz”

Koroshetz: “RECOVER Initiative is out to understand the biology behind the post-acute sequelae of COVID..so we can find treatments that will help people. So people have trouble with sleep. We try and understand what's wrong with the sleep in people who had post-COVID. Some people have trouble with memory and concentration. A lot of people have trouble with fatigue. So trying to understand the underlying biology that's causing this problem in them would be a tier two or tier three set of investigation.

Host: “Doctor, will you all come into this with a hypothesis that you think that long haul COVID is, is that some people get long haul COVID because, or is this you're gathering the data and see where the data lead?”

Koroshetz: “Yeah, so I'd say both of those things are what's happening. Unfortunately, I have to state that this is not, this is not our first rodeo, that there have been many infections in the past, Lyme disease, infectious mononucleosis, where some people go on to 10, 20, something like a lifetime of disability from these post-infectious symptoms. We've never been able to figure out what it is. So we are starting from very low knowledge base. So we do have to keep our eyes open. We can't be biased.

Now, that being said, there are a couple of culprits that we have to kind of nail down whether they're active or not. So we don't know as if there's persistent virus in the body that's continuously irritating the immune system. We don't know if the COVID infection upset somebody's immune system and it never reset back to normal. We don't know whether the COVID, the immune response to COVID kind of overlapped and set up an immune response against the person's own body, so-called autoimmune disorder. So those, I would say, the three big ones out there, but you can't be too biased. You want to rule them in or out quick, but we really don't know the answer to that question.

I can feel that frustration, and that's why we're really pushing on this study to try and get answers. As I mentioned in these other conditions, we think that this has led to people developing what we call myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS. And those people are disabled seemingly forever. And so that's what we're really hoping to understand quickly so that we can stave that off. Because as you can imagine, it's terribly frustrating when you're not getting better from this infection.

Host: “And we'll wanna talk to you months from now when you're finished with the research, and hopefully we'll have some encouraging findings”
 
4/21/21, "iHeartRadio Communities: Neurological Impact of COVID-19 & Childhood Hunger with Dr. Walter Koroshetz"

Koroshetz: “..what was surprising is that people who had COVID that didn't even require hospitalization, still some of them are having persistent symptoms out now, you know, six, seven months after they got infected. And that was something that no one really expected. There are some viruses that, you know, like mononucleosis, which is, you know, kids in college who often lose a semester or a year because they're so tired even after the virus is gone. So COVID is acting more like that at this point that people are having trouble many months later.

So, yeah, we have a major program that we're going to be launching now, have a talk about it, that is trying to get at the bottom of that problem, see if can get some treatments...so it's not one thing, it's multiple things that people are suffering from. The big one is fatigue…you don't have that inability to exercise or study or concentrate, that seems to be the overwhelmingly most common thing. And people complain of trouble with their memory and their ability to attend and to kind of think quickly..."
 
5/31/23, ‘From MetroFocus: The Podcast’: “The Long Covid Health Crisis Night 2”

Dr. Rainu Kaushal, Cornell: “What we think is happening in Long COVID, either they have an ongoing reservoir of virus..the other thing. is an inflammatory response..we know that COVID, like many other conditions, causes an inflammatory response, causes inflammation of the tissues, and we think that part of what happens in certain patients with Long COVID is the consequence of that inflammation.”

"So, Kevin, one of the most frustrating things for the people who I know who have developed long COVID, including our associate producer - who is listening to us now, is the fact that it seems so random…”

Kaushal: “So my sense is we just don't know enough yet about long COVID. What happened with COVID is our scientific community galvanized internationally in unprecedented ways, right? We've never seen a vaccine develop that quickly...we've never seen therapeutics develop this quickly. And with long COVID, it's been a little bit slower, partly because I think there is less security, right? People are not dying. And so there's an urgency, but that urgency is less acute.”
 
7/18/24, "From Conversations on Health Care “HHS’ Admiral Rachel Levine”

RL: “We have actually every month or so a Long COVID Coordinating Committee meeting involving almost every agency administration. We're going to do everything we can to support people impacted by Long COVID and their families in our communities. And we are playing a coordinating role, for example, with the NIH and their RECOVER Project. The RECOVER Project is going apace. It is going as fast as humanly possible.

“We're working with our ACL office in terms of disability, and we work with Social Security Administration in terms of disability, and then with the Labor Office in terms of workers. This work is happening across the administration. It is a priority of the administration. Long COVID is critically important. It's the absolute focus of our work.”
 
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