As measles cases soar worldwide, scientists have discovered yet another danger of the disease: the measles virus can wipe out the immune system, making people more susceptible to other illnesses later. The research sheds new light on a virus that’s infected humans for centuries.
The phenomenon is called “immune amnesia,” and a new study — published in Science — documented how it works. The measles virus appears to erase the body’s immune memory, destroying an average of 40 of the antibodies against other viruses and bacteria subjects in the study built up before the measles virus hit. This means people who get measles are more susceptible to other illnesses — pneumonia, flu, and skin infections — after an encounter with the virus, and that immune suppression can last for years.
This new side effect is an addition to all of the other well-known symptoms of measles, such as rash, cough, fever, and malaise. Measles can also lead to serious complications — pneumonia, brain swelling — and even death. In 2017, measles killed 110,000 people around the world and infected 6.7 million. About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people in the US who get measles need to be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Immune amnesia helps explain why the majority of deaths and complications are caused by infections people acquire after measles.
“[Measles] not only destroys overall immune function for a few weeks as children recover from the virus, it also prevents children’s ability to defend against pathogens they should have been equipped to deal with over the long term,” Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and lead author on the paper, told Vox.
The research, which built on previous studies about measles immune system suppression, also has massive public health implications.
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https://www.vox.com/2019/11/1/20943217/measles-outbreak-2019-vaccine
Measles causes long-term damage to the immune system, leaving children who have had it vulnerable to other infections long after the initial illness has passed, research has revealed.
Two studies of unvaccinated children in an Orthodox Protestant community in the Netherlands found that measles wipes out the immune system’s memory of previous illnesses, returning it to a more baby-like state, and also leaves the body less equipped to fight off new infections.
Measles eliminated between 11% and 73% of children’s protective antibodies, the research found.
“We’ve found really strong evidence that the measles virus is actually destroying the immune system,” said Prof Stephen Elledge, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and co-author of one of the papers. “The threat measles poses to people is much greater than we previously imagined.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/31/measles-wipes-out-immune-systems-memory-study-finds
Measles, the contagious childhood disease that is once more on the rise globally, is more harmful than previously thought.
A new analysis of 77 unvaccinated children from the Netherlands carried out by an international team of researchers led by scientists at Harvard has found that the virus erases the body's memory of previous pathogens -- effectively wiping its immunity memory.
The virus eliminated between 11 and 73 percent of the children's protective antibodies, blood proteins responsible for "remembering" previous encounters with disease, the team wrote in the journal Science on Thursday.
This left some of the children with immunity close to that of a newborn baby.
"It sort of resets your immune system back to sort of a more naive state," Harvard epidemiologist and coauthor Michael Mena told AFP.
In order to rebuild their defenses, they will need to be exposed to numerous pathogens as they were in their infancy, he added.
To validate their result, the team then carried out experiments on macaque monkeys, with the animals losing 40-60 percent of their protective antibodies.
"The virus is much more deleterious than we realized, which means the vaccine is that much more valuable," said study coauthor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Stephen Elledge.
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https://sg.yahoo.com/news/getting-measles-resets-bodys-immune-system-024115427.html
