Event comes as study suggests term ‘long covid’ “should be scrapped immediately”
Portuguese and foreign researchers are meeting next week in Lisbon for what Lusa calls an unprecedented international conference that aims to raise awareness of the relationship between ‘long covid’ and diseases such as chronic fatigue.
Speaking to Lusa, António Vaz Carneiro, retired professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Lisbon and one of the organisers, explained that there have always been cases of people who, after an acute viral infection, have extreme tiredness, inability to work, breathing difficulties and other symptoms. With Covid-19, this number has increased, but that does not mean this warrants creating a whole new syndrome,
“We used to call it post-viral syndrome, and we didn’t care”, he admitted. “For many years, people had chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis, which many doctors didn’t even believe, because there was nothing typical of these diseases in the blood or on imaging” (…) these patients were essentially “abandoned”.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, “a colossal amount of people” became infected (…) the vast majority are fine, but others see their existence profoundly affected,” he went on: “they have extreme, profoundly limiting tiredness, alterations in consciousness, they can’t concentrate, or even read”, some are left with “heart complications”
Rheumatologist Jaime Branco, a professor at Nova Medical School, adds that some people who suffered from Covid, still today “stay in bed for long hours during the day, which didn’t happen before they got sick” and in some cases, these symptoms persist for “months or even years”.
According to the World Health Organisation, one in 10 people infected during the pandemic maintain symptoms associated with what has become known as ‘long-covid’, but which, in the end, is probably just a fairly typical example of ‘post viral syndrome’.
The positive aspect, says Jaime Branco, is that this syndrome does not last forever. What the Covid pandemic appears to have done is simply highlight the fact that post-viral malaise is ‘real’: it is not something people are making up.
“Nobody believed in it” pre-pandemic, now, through the sheer numbers of people displaying symptoms, “everybody believes” in it, António Vaz Carneiro summarises.
And this leads to the next ‘issue’: there is no test to diagnose post viral syndrome; diagnosis is made by “exclusion of parts – eliminating the possibility of other diseases with identical symptoms”.
This is where experts feel progress can be made.
“I would very much like Portugal to be on the map, for us to also be part of multicentre clinical trials,” said Vaz Carneiro: “I hope that this meeting is just the start of a broader plan.”
Vaz Carneiro however did appear to open the door to the possibility that some post-Covid sufferers might never fully recover: “If these patients don’t recover (…), this will become a public health problem. Then I’m convinced that, in a couple of years’ time, it will probably be necessary to start thinking about resources exclusively for this disease.”
The international conference takes place on April 3 and 4 at the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD).
Meantime, a study in Australia has looked at ‘long Covid’ in much the same way, suggesting it is essentially a post-viral syndrome “like those that occur after infection with viruses, like flu”.
Researchers found that 16% of all respondents reported ongoing symptoms a year later, and 3.6% reported moderate-to-severe functional impairment in their activities of daily life.
The Australian study prompted a flurry of articles claiming “Long Covid isn’t real”. These were slightly ‘missing the point’: post-viral syndrome exists, it is simply that wrapping it up in new terminology “has potential to cause unnecessary fear and hypervigilance, which can impede recovery”.
Source material: LUSA/ pre-released information on European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2024, Barcelona, Spain, April 27-30)
