millions, best one yet. keep them coming to it's nice degrees and says, what is to that one great interview with top guest. finally, robin jewish says they were never a weapon to test it. but one of mass destruction is totally delusional. to think otherwise. post covert 1900 syndrome, or long core of it, is still one of the under reported. stories of the pandemic in the 1st year. attention was understandably focused on the dramatic acute cases of corbett crating . the most insecure war. however, it is gradually becoming understood that long term debilitation from the aftermath of the disease may be a socially and economically significant as immediate panoramic alex interviews, leading academic in the field. professor danny elfman of imperial college fest, danny elfman, thank you so much for joining me. in the, the alex simon show that this is still a relatively new condition,

because cobit obviously is a, is a new disease. how did the idea of long covert get 1st identified? was the route to long code has been a bit unusual yet because this is a disease. it's been identified not through the textbook, so lectures, but to social media, to disease of the social media age. or let's have a definition of the social media age in the sense that during those months, after the 1st wave of cobit, there were sufferers all around the world. initially, especially from europe, from italy, describing this condition. and they were the ones you've named it, you know, you've got the symptoms all listed down there. and that of course, will have set the advantages as well as being unusual because that means lots of people be talking to each other about the variety of symptoms. so each physician won't just be studying a single group of people in effect,

of access to information from a large group of people. i'm a big fan of the approach. this is a condition that being defined and find itself very visibly through the patients. the, you know, the naysayers in the cynic say, what a self reported, but you know, how could it be self reported when we have no other way and we're holding it. it's very real and a very good way of doing it. a long covert. well, will summarize a range of conditions of severity. i mean some people totally debilitated or that of extended period of time as some people just having periodic boats of weaknesses or a full range of the severity of symptoms. you know, i think we've worked very hard like any other clinical definition to have a very clear working definition that any t p can kick the box for so they know exactly what we're talking about. and that is difficult when you've got $200.00 puffs symptoms that are included under that list . but i think all of us working in it now have

a sense of what it looks like and what this thing is. and bearing in mind that this is still a new condition of the vaccines offering hope for, for long colbert suffers, we divide, seen, prevent people developing call that they reduced the severity of the mitchell symptoms for many people. did the awful, hopefully, long covert suffers. well, any indirectly in the sense that long covey couldn't see you from any active infection with a virus, it doesn't matter whether you are a symptomatic or intensive care. you are at risk of having long have it. the vaccines are really good and reduce the risk of getting infected in the 1st place. therefore, they also reduce your problem no more, no less than that. a possibility the therapy might be discovered, therefore that would affect with chase the violence. so the system or for people good dial along with the effectively beyond the aspect witnesses. so much research

at the moment all underway at every possible aspect. so sure if you could pin it down early, work out what it is where it comes from. you could perhaps treat people early with borrows or an inflammatory or if you just had a working definition what this thing is and you know they'd be 7036. i'm sure that you could, you can apply. but man, if your colleagues and intensive care made the point to me is that cover this unusual in the sense of violence which seems to attack the weakest points of the body almost is not purely bronco conditional, but can attack the little fleet and any other oregon long coleman symptoms do they have the same range of symptoms as the immediate condition? yeah, great point. so when we talk about the know the sheer basis of this horrible virus, i say one of the things it does is it binds this receptor ace to that all over the

body. and that has impacting your brain, your kidney, your liver, your lungs, you've got your blood vessels. and to some extent, one could argue that's married in the long symptoms. well, you could just say, well, as long as you logical door immune system is all of your body. so why should you have problems everywhere as local from, from your studies? is it a disease to viable still attacking the body or is the symptoms of previous attacks and the body attempting to, to recover from the infection? yeah, important question. so the jury is still slightly out on, on, which are the mechanisms we, we think most like people on it. some people like the idea is that it's a reservoir system virus, perhaps in the gardner. there's some good evans to support that. folks like ourselves also like the idea that it's kind of perturbation of normal immunity. that term, you know, your immune system takes months or years to get to know what should i estimate on

the number of people across the country. know who can be classified as long call the sufferers. yeah, so we baker a lot about this because we get into the hall definition and even the state versus the react data. depending on whether you say persistence is more than 4 weeks after acute tackle more than 8 weeks after that, or the real long haul is who is still desperate a year later. so we don't have to guess. i say a minimum of a 1000000 people in the u. k. and with that scale of, of condition, i've been consulted by government departments as to how these definitions can go into social security policy. for example, what, what's been done to, to deal with an infection and that must scale. well, you know, i would have to be up my role in it. i, i guess i get, i get asked consultant lots of different things including long. i really want to

see more and more consultation on this because, you know, we so constant our heads in the sand because this will have implications for health care planning for medical school numbers for employment law. you name it. this is going to all of the come. what would advice be to someone who believes of taking covert the leaves are suffering from the long symptoms, obviously consult their own possession, of course, but, but should they be going onto the internet? joining the society should be comparing notes of other people is therapy in itself is more than a therapy. i think the, the patient groups have been dying. emma, they really have led the race and, and you know, some doctors are good and some are less good and need to be able to walk into that g p. surgery and state. okay, very clearly. and i think the support groups can help you to do that. that's all meant in terms of the, the range of,

of symptoms. you've seen report him. obviously, fatigue would be much of a common factor. other, other things that people should be looking for in particular, we know that the acute condition of sam, characteristic light loss of smell this long cold but also have certain common factors and afflicting many people. it does everything so many good studies on this now mainly out the support groups where the list now stretches to some right, 200. so i think commonly near the top of the list all know your fatigue, brain fog, neuro, cognitive, wheezing and breathlessness. chest pain, loss of taste, and property, and hair loss, and then you get also slightly rarer ones, but they are the super common all around the world. i'm speaking running the world, how much from international effort is being focused on, on tackling the long corporate. i think it really is important to have an international effort that is growing. and there are a meetings put up

a world health organization and looking at it. and i, h and in the united states grew together different groups in different countries. and it's important, i think that a person anywhere in the world feels they have the same rights to walk into the doctor surgery and say, you know, i've been out of actually for last 6 months help me talk to my employer helped me to get mom to come to get some treatment and i can't be local answers. those need to be global answers. and i think we're, you know, we're trying hard to build those. it's still an aspect which long cool with his at the back of the queue while people deal with the acute condition. yeah. so we basically what 19 or 20 months now as fire fighting and looking at daily for allergies and little tolerance. good anything else? but all i say when i get a chance to speak to policymakers about this is, you know, we can't, we can't duck this. when i look, for example, of brazil and their exposure to continue a virus. long off, you stopped worrying about the acute infection. you have to worry about those 3 or

4 or 5 years of off the lot of people flooding your clinics. desperate to help out of work loss of income. you know, so whether you like it or not, it's all there to want to come. so taking that opportunity, speaking to the, the health administers those factories and the ford administration of the u. k. what message would you have to them about what's coming and terms of the long covered pandemic? oh, you know, let's do the crystal ball gazing. let's do the planning, let's do the financial planning to the health care planning. let's be the manpower planning because it is noble and it is going to be here to us if we don't address it. so bearing in mind the new conduct lease prolonged the most of the deadly pernicious violence. but in terms of your medical expertise in a range of professional men, that's the, remind you of any other virus in terms of the way it's attacking people over for

a long period. the simple answer is like everything else were coded. we didn't see it coming. i didn't see it coming. we thought karone of ours just didn't do things like this. but when i think back to other things i've worked on in the past, i think of things like glandular fever. the way that that can them come in and take teenagers, especially in really lay them alone, long period. i think about work. we do in brazil on them. she can go near virus. you get from mosquitoes where a lot of people forgotten a huge infection, that they're, you know, they can't go to work because they've got a kind of thing, you know, freitas for years afterwards. so there are plenty of models out there that we can look at. and try and understand what's going on. festal, danny elfman of imperial colors, london, thank you so much for joining me on the alex salmon show. coming up after the break, alex continues discussions on the impact of loan call that proceeding. me. oh i

the way the u. s. government funded is through the issue of treasury bonds and they pay the interest on those bonds by collecting taxes who owns most of those bond. virtually all those bonds, the top 110th of one percent. so the government simply becomes a pastor mechanism for people to pay money from their pockets through something called taxes that are just a thickly that hides the transmission mechanism of your money through the government into those who own these bond. september the 11th 2001 day that reshape to the modern world. i remember watching the world trade center burn on

a tv at the cia and i was standing there like this just looking at it. and a colleague of mine was standing next to me and he said, my god, did they have any idea what they've done? we're going to kill everybody now. everybody, the, the live tv images promote the us into declaring its war on terror. began to bomb afghans, villages and holders, and get people hurt and, and killed the main goal of destroying terrorism and then was it achieved? yes. and no. okay. to essentially no longer exists good for us. but there are certainly other terrorist groups that are worse than welcome back, the early weeks for the pines and were busy for nicely. mcdermott specialize in

pediatric infectious diseases and with experience and medical spots to disaster and expertise was in great media demand. then she contacted colbert herself, alex takes up the story with doctor mcdermott thought to madame, and i thank you again for joining me only alex simon, show my patient. thank you. well, let's go back to the start of the fun damage. i mean, there, you are very much demand by, by the media because of your expertise and an infectious diseases. and then suddenly, from being somebody explaining the pandemic to the public, you became a software yourself. what exactly happened, that type of stuff to kinda make or at least around march time i returned to clinical work and while working at one of those 2 in london, i contract with 90. i was only on wow, probably for,

but it was probably about 4 weeks to fully get back to normal. but i was back at work after about 10 days. and then i was working and then again, well, working on the board in about may time i became on well with an almost identical illness again to cambridge, which seemed a very quick time to become on while again. but i became a while and had a very similar illness for about a couple of weeks. but during that time, i also developed some pain in my feet and not had sensation and my feet and things have kind of gradually progressed from that to now where i'm quite limited in my abilities, walk, i work with crutches and i have some, some issues with my bladder and we're still trying to get to the bottom of exactly what, what has happened. so less was striking us were feel medical expertise. you must have fenced quite quickly. that little, this is strange. i mean,

this is something i should have recovered from. this is not the same as getting another boat of coven saw it with your medical expertise backlit. and you must realize philly adler, with something very, very different going on here. yeah, i think initially i had a lot of pain in my feet during that 1st 2 weeks where i had the k b like illness. so i just thought it was passive by i had a lot of muscle aches and pains, so i thought it was part of that. and then all of the other symptoms are though, but the pain in my feet didn't. and i think when i started to realize that it resembled no pain in my face, and i spoke with my doctor and, and golf medication. but you know, you can get situations like that following viruses that are relatively transient. and then so to resolve. so i think i just type at the time that it would gradually get better. but then i realized when i was trying to drive my call one day to, to get to the pharmacy, to get my prescription, the. she couldn't feel the pedals properly with my feet. and then i started to

realize actually my legs went as strong as they were. and i kinda hate that, you know, obviously i've been on well, so it takes time and pretty ever a couple of weeks i would build up that strength and my legs again, but i just never did. despite going full every single day. i never managed to build that strength up again, and then things seem to kind of gradually get worse in stages. so in september time i had quite a significant deterioration. and that's when i was, i became a very limited in how far i could walk and, and then gradually every time i, i got the crutches and i got a bit further even crutches but not, not without them. and then i think in january time i had another set back, some issues with my bladder and so on. so that kind of yeah. so it kind of continued to progress from there saying, well of course your own medical experience including working on academics and the african continent range of, of viruses and diseases. had you recognized anything quite light,

listen. and although via conditions i think probably not identical, certainly with the boa. we know that area is what's referred to by some of the page to beta syndrome and people can have sort of ongoing to clearly. but with the biter, it tends to be very specific, largely speaking, focused on the eyes. so people get a lot of information in the eyes and if that's not treated properly, they can go blind. but we also see that people have joint pain. and i also have tightness and headaches and so on. they said there are some features that last, but i think we probably didn't see it on quite the level that we have seen. people developing problems following caving and probably not with quite the variety of symptoms that people have following with about or it was quite limited to sort of mainly 5 specific symptoms. olson syndrome, in terms of which organ system was affected, long covert a very unusual,

a new condition, obviously. but wasn't unusual in the sense it was actually named by the social media. and will you part of these? sadly, social media groups who are competing experience, who likes the name, the the condition and brought it to public awareness. so i think it had been probably named shortly before i was really involved with some of the social media great side. i think i saw to get involved in, in around the july end of july, beginning of august time, when things still were improving in my condition. you know, i'd kind of anticipated a few weeks of recovery and things still went any better. so i, i guess i joined a bit later so, and already been named. but for me, i was part of some of the doctors grades that were discussing the symptoms and discussing what was going on and, and realizing just how many people might, might be affected by this condition. so it was much of the medical profession, understandably caught up in the acute phase of the pandemic. and

a lot of the media concentration on the intensive care was, and one of the national health service would be overwhelmed in an acute sense. i think of that the social media was unable, at least for getting some concentration on this and shooting phase of the, of the disease and communicating with fellow sufferers. yes. that and he, and i think it's provided a lot of support to people during that time, especially when they couldn't access any kind of health care or any kind of, you know, really attention from their doctors. so i think it certainly provided a support network. i know it's received criticism because people believe that it fuels people believing that as a problem, even if they don't potentially have one. but i would disagree. i think it's been an extremely good support network people, many of whom are still struggling even 18 months into the pandemic to actually get the kind of health care attention that they,

that they need and that they deserve. so i think it's been use them in that sense, but i would say in particular, use them in, in raising awareness opposite to ation. it wasn't really until the autumn of last year that i would say to you government, some people seem to really catch on board about the significance of long have it in the number of people affected and, and people affected a very long period of time. so what do you think needs to be done in terms of official response to long coven given the, the number of people who are clearly being afflicted with the condition? i think it is being taken seriously now by the u. k. government, but i think there's still not the level of seriousness being taken by the medical community actually towards it. sometimes in terms of treating people, there's a co grief of clinician who are doing very well at caring for patients and raising awareness about the situation. but equally then some may say as who dismiss it and

simply think that it's just some level of fatigue and that people will get better. and it's not really that big a deal. and i think that people need to take on board that it is. and i'll say when it comes to children, i think there is still a degree of dismissal about affecting children and young people. and actually, i think we need to be taking it more seriously because, well, proportionally, it might not affect as many young people as it does. adults, it's still affecting a significant group of young people and some older children. and we need to factor in, and i'm not entirely convinced that being factored into our decision making about the vaccine. certainly from the documents i've read from the g b i, whilst they comment on it sort of a sentence about it that says well, long have age. it doesn't, we've had people raise concerns about located it, but it doesn't really seem to be something that profession children that much. and i think that if we're going to take into effect the side effects of back scenes and

the risks of them, which are actually extremely rare. why we then not taking into account that people or children with long with it might go on have long, even if that's only 48 percent of them, that vastly higher than the risk of the side effect from the vaccine. so i just, i just wonder why we're not taking it seriously as we should yet. and finally made the ultimate, in terms of your order conditioning your own experience. are you detecting some lighter than the tunnel is progress being made? i would say, sadly not i think i'm just, i'm learning to live with my limitations a little bit better. but i don't think that that's really been any significant progress in terms of my in year a logical condition. and i continue to occasionally develop new symptoms related to that as well, which obviously a little bit concerning,

but hopefully we are making some progress to where the problem is. i had some investigations recently which had suggested there is a problem at the very base of my spinal cord. so hopefully i might get some more imaging seen and identify what 3 going on, both of them and you have a very best wishes and, and thank you once again for joining me now. examine show. thank you very much. the focus on keep illness in face. one of the panoramic is understandable. st. thomas is hostile. behind me. it's me. the prime minister himself was treated loved ones dying intensive care words full, the health service, buckling under the pressure. this is what is dictated to focus on acute care. that is a human cost of the pandemic. however, it is increasingly apparent in social and economic terms, the threats of long cove, it is even greater on a conservative estimate. 10 times as many people will suffer,

debilitating effects of long term corporate. i have died from the 1st stage of the panoramic. this leads to serious questions on the policy of the ford administration of big u. k. s one cove. it is a compatible threat to the acute stages of panoramic ben. why the allowing the high levels of disease to sweep through the population in all 4 countries, public health prevention measures have been the last to the point of non existence . the health service may not be overwhelmed in the short term thanks to the impacts of faxing. but in terms of human misery, they may be piling up huge problems for the future. the cost of freedom, they may be very high indeed. but for now you from alex, myself and all the sure is good by stacy. i hope to see you all again. next week, ah,

me the, it's an open secret that private military companies have been playing a role in om complex worldwide. u. s. government doesn't track the number of contractors that uses in places that iraq or afghanistan, the united states army. and the military in general is so reliance on the private sector. i would call the dependency divide. we don't know who's the on the ground presence of these companies overseas. we just don't know. the western private military companies can, in turn, use so called sub contractors from countries with trouble past the kansas quite good that they have also been charles soldiers. i was i drove professional

drug is his work from the senior quarter with no, no limit, malone and they were trying to be merciless killing machine. and now they fight and die in other people's was people carol, lot one or a dead soldier or dead? marine shows up in this country and we started asking ourselves, why did they die? why do what were they fighting for? nobody bothers down to the contractors in the these terrorist play by a whole set of different rules. it's going to force us in your words to get mean 30 nasty in order to take them on, right. we'll use all tools at our disposal to do so. my name is a monarch committee

. i'm the head of a family member. can, can they packed up and killed our children and we will never forgive them for leave . this place is a pity my, what the united states was doing. in afghanistan, they were bringing people in this afghans for abusing them outside of the law and then allowing some of them to go back home and they would go home and tell people this is what the americans that we are looking at. it was a pointless exercise in the civic leg around the world. expedition by 1000 miles round the clock of the dead. calm the national every country close by with the

crew. gavin's food and water harbor, fortune to go to church. those also was literally little. i know i got everybody locked down or no more, no food and no water. but really, you know, i'm not sure somebody either stuck a specially built in the coven, your living like the theme at home. but in the 21st century, i have an alternate realities. experience or even live in like a world war, does my dear, you know, especially during the and damage where you can go anywhere in the game world, go everywhere, choose the game that you want, any open roll game, choose it,

and you are now on a vacation in a place where you're like flying helicopters or you're, you're on beaches, you're, you're in a city drive, you know, what are the car you want your name? and these, these are getaways in the head of the 911 anniversary, and he's been looking at the lasting impact of the us led war on terror today. we'll be hearing from a british army ventured on the devastating toll of the 20 year rascal conflict. we've lost too many people for situations which we just gave up on. and also had the taliban unveils this new government crop. gonna stand including a terrorist on the f. b, i most wanted list washington left with no option, but to go up right with the incoming leadership and the doctor in florida cause he's outraged by refusing to treat patients who.