lotta fucked up shit that can happen to the human body but the fact that you can catch strep one day as a kid just wake up with OCD from it is nuts. and then they had the gall to name it PANDAS???
Actually, I think the medical community could get better at recognizing that all sorts of infections can set of long lasting or permanent autoimmune fuckery in people who are predisposed. That includes neurological symptoms. It doesn’t only happen in kids and it doesn’t only happen with things that are trying to look like human proteins, it can happen due to cross reactions and stuff too.
When you have severe enough autoimmune fuckery you find out really quickly that any infection of any kind, or even a severe allergy attack, can mean new lasting symptoms in any bodily system or new chronic pain. Lots of well known viruses or bacteria that are “so common tho” can trigger a permanent worsening of symptoms, or new symptoms.
We’re starting to see this happen a lot more visibly with Covid and long covid, but that kind of reaction has always existed for people with a trigger happy immune system. Ms cfs fibromyalgia and etc are all now understood to be complex reactions to herpes family viruses which had previously not been understood to cause life long debilitating symptoms that were anything more than cosmetic or a bit of -sometimes severe- surface pain.
A virus I caught in my 20’s made me develop narcolepsy! And some vaccines cause this too, in some vulnerable people, because they are designed to cause an immune reaction! [you should still probably get vaccinated for whatever you can, this is not an anti-vax argument, just recognize some people can’t.] This shit has been happening to me through my life and worsening any time I am exposed to specific pathogens! I promise it isn’t just kids. And we should study it more.
Wikipedia has an article on Pandemrix, the H1N1 flu vaccine associated with increased risk of narcolepsy in 2009. Notably, it was found that getting infected with H1N1 and/or other upper respiratory infections themselves increased the risk of developing narcolepsy, with other H1N1 vaccines being a negligible factor – meaning that, given what we’ve seen of long COVID and its risk factors, vaccination is still likely the safest option for the vast majority of people.