- Last Friday, the National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER-Treating Long COVID (RECOVER-TLC) initiative held a webinar to share updates. TLC has started to form working groups, which are meeting this and next month to discuss potential Long COVID treatments for clinical trials. People with Long COVID, researchers, and clinicians have submitted over 400 potential treatments to the initiative and over one thousand people have applied for the working groups; these forms remain open for more submissions. Find more information on the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER-TLC webpage.
- A new RECOVER study found that the incidence of ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome) following SARS-CoV-2 infection was 15 times higher than pre-pandemic rates. Published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, researchers used the Institutes of Medicine (IOM) definition of the disease to evaluate over 15,000 participants in RECOVER’s observational study. “There has been a lot of discussion about whether ME/CFS and Long COVID are the same,” author Susanne Vernon wrote in a Bateman Horne Center blog post. “RECOVER has helped us understand that ME/CFS is a subset, likely a severe subset, of the much larger Long COVID group.”
- A new review in Journal of Infection and Public Health found that portable air filters (PAFs) reduce infections from airborne diseases. “This is settled science, and has been for decades,” the authors wrote, highlighting that portable purifiers had many benefits besides filtering airborne viruses, including filtering allergens and wildfire smoke. The authors recommend that public health authorities “position PAFs appropriately in infection prevention and control plans for both health care and community settings in order to more effectively address airborne infectious diseases.”
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