SHOTS HEALTH NEWS – Michelle Wilson got COVID three years ago. She’s still waiting for her brain and nervous system to recover.
Wilson’s memory is spotty, she’s frequently in pain, and even a short walk leaves her exhausted.
“I actually bought a cane that turns into a seat so I can go to the botanical garden,” she says.
It’s a big change for Wilson, 66, who had worked as a nurse at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. But after years of waiting to get better, she says she’s realized something:
“This might be as good as it gets.”
“Unfortunately, long COVID, as we know it now, can affect nearly every organ system, including the brain.”
It’s a story shared by a growing number of COVID “long-haulers” — those patients who suffer from persistent symptoms long after the initial infection has passed. Many of those symptoms, experts say, appear to be tied to COVID’s effects on the brain and nervous system.
Government surveys suggest that millions of people in the U.S. are living with neurological symptoms linked to long COVID. Many, like Wilson, were infected before vaccines became available.
“It’s a public health crisis,” says Dr. Robyn Klein, who directs the Center for Neuroimmunology and Infectious Diseases at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
“There are a lot of people suffering and those people need treatment yesterday,” says Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, who holds positions at both Washington University and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System.
But treatment remains a distant promise.
“There’s still a ton we don’t know,” says Dr. Troy Torgerson of the Allen Institute for Immunology in Seattle. Scientists are “nibbling away” at the problem, he says.
The virus appears to do most of its damage to the brain indirectly, scientists say.
An infection in the body triggers an immune response that leads to inflammation in the brain. And the inflammation can persist long after the virus has apparently been cleared …
PROSECUTE FAUCI?
Kellie Meyer, JUL 31, 2023
(NewsNation) — Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul announced an “official criminal referral” to the Department of Justice over Dr. Anthony Fauci and the origins of the COVID-19 virus.
As Paul’s public feud with Fauci, the former chief medical advisor to the president, continues, he points to an unredacted email from February 2020, where Fauci refers to a phone call with “highly credible scientists.”
These scientists “were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCov there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted,” according to the email to which Paul referred. | source.
