Years ago, coming down with measles was like a rite of passage. Before the vaccination for measles began in America, in the early 1960s, millions of Americans contracted the virus every year, most of the patients were children. This forced them to weather a flu-like illness and telltale skin rash, but also bestowing lifelong immunity.
Because of this, some people see measles as harmless. This adds to a dangerous uprising of anti-vaccine sentiment, has led some parents to decline vaccine for their children. This then contributed to a resurgence of preventable illness in America and overseas.
Studies that were published in Science and Science Immunology, however, busts the myth that measles is not dangerous. In addition to being a serious disease in its own right, measles can also wipe out a person's immune system, thus leaving them with immune amnesia that makes them more susceptible to other diseases.
Understanding measles
Experts have known that measles predisposes sufferers to other illnesses. Measles can also lead to serious and life-threatening complications like neurological damage. Most of the estimated 110,000 global measles-related deaths each year came from concurrent infections like pneumonia.
Velislava Petrova, a postdoctoral fellow in immunogenetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the U.K. said that every time that we see a pathogen, our immune system recognizes this pathogen, builds immunity to it and then stores it in the form of immune memory.
The measles virus attacks the memory cells, thus effectively leaving the patients with an immune system that no longer remembers the pathogens to which it has already built up immunity, and an impaired ability to fight them off.
Petrova and other researchers conducted their study in a part of the Netherlands with low measles vaccination rates. They analyzed the blood samples of 26 children from ages 4 to 17 who were unvaccinated and had never had measles. This means that they could develop the infection organically, both when they were healthy and again after a measles outbreak in the community. They also added three unvaccinated kids who did not develop measles as a control group.
The blood sample that they tested revealed that the children who had recovered from measles had the right number of white blood cells, which is crucial to mounting an immune response and fighting off disease. But sequencing revealed that the types of white blood cells were not right. Petrova said that our immune cells recover back to normal numbers, but they are no longer the same memory cells.
Measles affect your immune system
The researchers analyzed the antibody activity on kids before and after measles infection, and they found that, two months after recovery, they had lost around 73% of their antibody diversity.
The virus did not just wipe out memory cells, it also replaces them with new cells that give immunity against future measles infection. So while those who come down with measles are protected from future complications of the virus, they are still left unprotected from other viruses, pathogens and are left not equipped to respond to new ones.
The researchers also confirmed that finding by infecting ferrets that were flu-vaccinated with a measles-like illness. After contracting measles, the ferrets no longer had immunity against the flu, and they experienced severe flu symptoms, compared to those that had the flu before contracting measles.
Petrova says that measles makes our immune system more baby-like, babies are vulnerable to infections because their immune system is still maturing. That is what measles does. Petrova says that in future research, they will focus on learning how measles manages this feat. The answer may lie in the ability of the virus to infiltrate and alter bone marrow, which is the body's reservoir for immune cells.
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