The human immune system is so complicated that it doesn't take a new disease to spark consequential research and discoveries. It has been known for a long time that while a case of measles will confer lifetime immunity against catching measles again, you are then more likely to suffer and even die of some other infectious disease. Public health records show that children who survive a bout of measles (and the overwhelming majority do) lose their ability to fight off different diseases afterward. In 2012, this phenomena was named "Immune amnesia."
Essentially, when you're infected with measles, your immune system abruptly forgets every pathogen it's ever encountered before – every cold, every bout of flu, every exposure to bacteria or viruses in the environment, every vaccination. The loss is near-total and permanent. Once the measles infection is over, current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what's good and what's bad almost from scratch.
On average, it takes about three years for children to re-develop the immunity to diseases that they had before they contracted measles. Children who are vaccinated against measles apparently don't suffer from immune amnesia. Studies show that the measles vaccine reduces a child's chance of death from all diseases in the next few years by a degree that greatly exceeds the chance of dying from measles itself. And in the years since the discovery of the effect, scientists have found out a lot about how the measles virus rewires our immune systems.
This discovery will interest those of us who contracted measles before there was a vaccine against it. Did the illness negate the effects of the vaccines we got before? It should cause even more concern for parents who opt not to vaccinate their children against measles. Read about measles and immune amnesia at BBC Future. -via Kottke
Comments (3)
Poor guy. He'll never live that down.