Long Covid patients are being ‘left to their own devices’
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Loading... - Cortez Sancha
- 26 Apr 2023
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Doctors and patients are calling for a national action plan to improve what they consider the failing treatment of Long Covid patients in the Netherlands, the AD reports. Research into Long Covid is fractured and underfunded, and treatment is dependent on the individual efforts of doctors or hospitals, doctors and patient organisations told the paper.
Jan Kluytmans, a professor of microbiology and member of the government’s Outbreak Management Team said Long Covid patients are not getting the medical answers they are after and are being ‘left to their own devices’, often seeking unproven alternative help.
‘If you have cancer, every door opens. Treatment is costly but that is no impediment, and that is how it should be. But with Long Covid the doors remain closed,’ Kluytmans said. Long Covid, he said, would become a ‘very important disease if some wonder drug became available’, but that as long as there is no proven treatment, health insurers are not paying.
Investments
Experts are also calling investment into the disease – currently just over €10 million – ‘laughable compared to the size of the problem.’ Researchers have estimated that one in eight people who caught coronavirus have longer term problems but how many people are permanently disabled by the disease is not known. Health minister Ernst Kuipers said in a reaction that more research into Long Covid cures and diagnosis is needed and that the health ministry is supporting European-wide research. Kuipers said he will shortly discuss plans for an expertise centre aimed at longer term national research. ‘We are making progress but for those directly involved it is a slow process, we are aware of that,’ the minister said. Read More…
