Is the covid-19 pandemic, complete with the “mysterious” long term symptoms that linger in its wake, a replay of what happened in Lake Tahoe in 1985? Lisa Petrison thinks it may be.
https://paradigmchange.me/wp/coronavirus/
Here’s a link to an post by Lisa Petrison about the covid-19 pandemic and environmental toxins, specifically mold.
I think that while this post is addressing acute covid-19, that it is relevant to Long Covid. It’s possible that environmental factors could be a two way street. Apparently, clinicians and patients are discovering that covid is leading to MCAS (mast cell activation syndrome) in many patients. Mast cell activation syndrome is not a syndrome with a totally fleshed-out etiology, and the ultimate upstream cause is not known. Infection has been known to trigger MCAS, possibly bc Mast cells are part of the innate immune system which is the most primal first defense of the body to infection or toxin or invader if any kind.
If long covid involves immune dysregulation and dysautonomia, its possible that environmental toxins or pollutants are contributing to the syndrome. They wouldn’t have to be a first cause, but could be part of a multi factorial feedback loop.
Theo Theoharides is researching links between long covid and mcas already, claiming that mast cell stabilizer luteolin helps with the characteristic brain fog: https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/biof.1726
In fact, infection and “bad air” working in concert would be just like the original CFS outbreak in Lake Tahoe, or at least how proponents of what user “@Hip” on the Phoenixrising forum calls the “dual-factor theory of ME/CFS ” envision it. Immune suppression by something like mycotoxins or cyanotoxins or pollution makes it easier for a viral infection to become more serious, but also the viral infection causes long term immune dysfunction that makes the immune system react with intense inflammatory surges to environmental triggers. It’s a complex problem that would take many many years of air sampling and thorough epidemiology to get to the root of, but it’s important to start talking about it.
And if there is an overlap in the longcovid/environmental illness/ME/CFS venn diagram, then that means a possibility of increased funding for research on “whatever this cluster of syndromes is”, since long term covid symptoms seems to be receiving far, far more funding than ME/CFS, MCAS, or mold illness. See https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00586-y for what I’m talking about. Of course it may be overly optimistic that the NIH will actually help us, but it could happen almost by accident, with those funds trickling down somehow, or work in a related field illuminating mechanisms relevant to our disease. Even if we can’t count on the benevolence or competence of Walter koroshetz or Francis Collins, we may be able to count on the collective concern and increased spending on covid research to illuminate an older problem.
Additionally, with the knowledge of how covid is spread, a lot more attention has been paid to building ventilation, sort of vindicating the old “miasma” theory of disease, which was seen as mutually exclusive with the germ theory, which I think is a false dichotomy.
Hopefully, Ron Davis at the Open Medicine Foundation, who has received long covid related grants, will eventually warm up to the idea of using funding to research environmental factors and epidemiology of that disease and ME/CFS as well.
Here are a few relevant videos: