This Week in Virology, the podcast about viruses, the kind that make you sick.

From Microbe TV, this is Twive this weekend virology a special episode recorded on May 31st

2024 I'm Vincent Rachin-yellow and you're listening to the podcast all about viruses.

Today I'm back in Stockholm at the Carolinska Institute and my guest is a professor here. Judith Brookfeld, welcome to Twive.

Thank you.

Brookfeld is good. Okay, I'm sure you have all kinds of pronunciation.

Yes, but that's the real pronunciation, although I use others.

So we're going to talk today about long COVID, but first I want our listeners to understand

you a bit.

Tell us a bit about your background and your training. Yes, so I was born and raised in Stockholm,

Sweden, but I have French and I have, have well more of an international background and I started

actually before I started my training as a doctor I went to Peru to the jungle close to the

Brazilian border to to volunteer at a hospital that was specially designed for the indigenous population, the Shepivo Indians

there and I worked there for a year and after that I came home I started to train to be a doctor and the only

thing I wanted to do was infectious diseases because I was an idealist at that time

but that sort of stayed the same during my years as a doctor.

And I trained to be an infectious disease specialist and I've been working as that here at

Kowlinska University Hospital but I'm also affiliated to the Kowlinska

Institute as a researcher and, and then my main disease has been actually tuberculosis.

So I'm a national and also international specialist in TB, but when COVID-19 hit us or the whole world, I also took an interest in what would happen with these very ill patients that we saw first

as in patients, hospitalised patients. And we decided to follow them up. We opened a specialized clinic and then we also found out very early

actually during the summer of 2020 that also young people that had not been hospitalized, they did not recover.

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