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Long COVID Has Forced a Reckoning for One of Medicine’s Most Neglected Diseases

“We’re adding an immense volume of patients to an already dysfunctional and overburdened system ... ”

The Atlantic – Kira Stoops can’t walk around her own block on most days. To stand for more than a few minutes, she needs a wheeled walker. She reacts so badly to most foods that her diet consists of just 12 ingredients.

Her “brain fog” usually lifts for a mere two hours in the morning, during which she can sometimes work or, more rarely, see friends. Stoops has myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). “I’m considered a moderate patient on the mild side,” she told me.

ME/CFS involves a panoply of debilitating symptoms that affect many organ systems and that get worse with exertion. The Institute of Medicine estimates that it affects 836,000 to 2.5 million people in the U.S. alone, but is so misunderstood and stigmatized that about 90 percent of people who have it have never been diagnosed.

At best, most medical professionals know nothing about ME/CFS; at worst, they tell patients that their symptoms are psychosomatic, anxiety-induced, or simply signs of laziness.

“Many cases of long COVID are effectively chronic fatigue syndrome by another name.”

While ME/CFS patients, their caregivers, and the few doctors who treat them have spent years fighting for medical legitimacy, the coronavirus pandemic has now forced the issue.

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A wide variety of infections can cause ME/CFS, and SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is no different: Many cases of long COVID are effectively ME/CFS by another name.

The exact number is hard to define, but past studies have shown that 5 to 27 percent of people infected by various pathogens, including Epstein-Barr virus and the original SARS, develop ME/CFS. Even if that proportion is 10 times lower for SARS-CoV-2, the number of Americans with ME/CFS would still have doubled in the past three years.

“We’re adding an immense volume of patients to an already dysfunctional and overburdened system,” Beth Pollack, a scientist at MIT who studies complex chronic illnesses, told me.

The U.S. has so few doctors who truly understand the disease and know how to treat it …

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