A recent study correlated two conditions: Long Covid like HIV. Here’s why and what is happening to people.
Covid and HIV are both two viruses causing diseasealbeit deeply different from each other. Nevertheless something similar happens to people affected by Long Covid ai AIDS patients.
Let’s start from the beginning, or by specifying what the Long Covid. It’s about a condition that develops in some subjects who have contracted the disease from the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Even after recovery, people continue to experience various health problems, and even for many months following the infection.
Many studies have looked into these issues, e every day Science discovers new things. In fact, Long Covid is not a unique condition, far from it: people show very different symptoms and health discomforts.
For example, you go from chronic fatigue at the “brain fog”dai muscle aches and lack of appetite up to breathing problemssense of tightness in the chest and sensory disorders (taste, smell, hearing). But there are also more serious symptoms, such as those affecting the thyroid glandwhich some scientists have also found in people after one year of infection.
In addition to all this, however, another worrying phenomenon is emerging, and scholars have demonstrated it. Here’s what it is.
Long Covid like HIV, what’s happening to people and why: the study
For the first time in recent history, a disease has changed human social behaviors. Many will think of AIDS, and that’s correct. Indeed people infected with the HIV virus have suffered severe discrimination and to this day, even though decades have passed, it still happens. It created itself the idea that HIV only infects people who are drug addicts, homosexuals or lead a dissolute life. In reality, this virus can affect anyone, and in various ways.
At the same time, even Covid can infect all of us, in various ways, and looks neither at social class nor at sexual preferences. But heavy labels and prejudices loom around the sick, the vaccinated, the unvaccinated and those recovered from the virus.
And recent studyconducted in United Kingdomha demonstrated that those suffering from Long Covid feel discriminated against. It happens emotionally but also in work life. There are people who are not believed, even by the doctors themselves, or fired by employers because the seriousness of the condition is not accepted. Many people even they are ashamed to admit they had Covidas if this were a disease worse than the others.
The testimonials of these unfortunate events have been collected in a study, carried out by Marija Pantelic, of the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, in the UK. The work team analyzed the statements of 1100 peoplereleased between 2020 and 2021. What emerged is quite worrying.
Indeed, il 95% of people stated one feeling of “stigma” at least once, and 76% often or always. Almost two thirds of the subjects, il 63%he said negative experiences, such as disrespect of the health condition. While 91% of those affected by Long CVID “knew” that they would receive different treatments. 86% of those interviewed said they felt a “deep sense of shame” inherent in the diagnosis of Long Covid.
All of that, as well as being humanly deplorableis likely to also affect the care and proper healing by people. Pantelic, together with the results of her study, invites the competent authorities to find a solution to this problem and to devise interventions against discrimination.