Dr. Adam Ratner heard many myths and misunderstandings on measles during his decades as a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases in New York.
A disturbing lie that he saw circulating on social networks during the current epidemic is that the infected by the virus instead of being vaccination gives advantages on the immune system – a power training program for cells.
The truth, said Ratner, “is exactly the opposite.”
Measles is a highly contagious virus that is in the form of symptoms of eruption and cold cure for many patients, and can cause serious or fatal complications for others. An epidemic that started in western Texas in January has since infected nearly 500 people in 19 states, including eight people in California.
An insidious but less known consequence of a light measles infection is that it kills the very cells that remember the pathogens that the patient previously fought and how these battles were won. Consequently, recurring bugs that could only have caused minor symptoms make patients as sick as if they had never encountered them before.
The measles destroys the lymphocytes that defend themselves against other bugs to make way for those who defend themselves against measles, an immunity gained at the cost of other protections.
This “immune amnesia”, according to doctors, leaves patients vulnerable to the use of diseases to which their immune cells have already been able to resist.
If a child falls ill from measles, “over the next two or three years, you have to somehow look over your child’s shoulder, you wonder if a virus or bacteria that should be very well protected against which was potentially landing them in the hospital,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist who was previously an assistant teacher infectious at the Harvard School.
“Even if the infection by your measles virus seemed soft and you exploded it, it does not mean that it was soft on your immune system,” added Mina.
Take rotavirus, said Ratner, which causes severe diarrhea that can be fatal for children if it is not treated. A child who has a rotavirus will have antibodies which offer protection against future infections.
But a infection of measles, said Ratner, author of the recent book “Booster plans: urgent measles lessons and the uncertain future of children’s health“” Could eliminate this immunity and they could be just as vulnerable to rotavirus as if they had never seen it before. “”
Immune amnesia is the result of the measles virus attack plan. The viral particles move by droplets suspended in the air of saliva, mucus and cells that make their way in a new body when their host without distrust inspires them.
From there, they sneak in front of the protective barrier which lines the respiratory system and head towards the lymph nodes in search of cells which express a particular protein called the molecule of lymphocyte signaling, or Slam.
The virus then rolls around the blood circulation on these cells expressing the diverted, infecting slam and destroying more other expressors of Slam which he encounters on the way.
Among the cells expressing slam that the wrecks of measles are B and T lymphocytes, two crucial actors in a functional immune system. B -memory cells quickly make right antibodies when a familiar microbe appears. The T memory cells recognize and kill the viruses that your cells have encountered in the past.
An infection of measles feeds on these cells of memory. Vaccines, on the other hand, stimulate the production of B and T memory cells without consuming others in the process.
This has not yet been understood in the decades before the approval of measles, mumps and rubella in 1963, when measles was a common childhood which killed some 400 children in the United States each year.
“For 100 years or more, we know that measles causes acute sensitivity to other infections,” said Mina.
An infection of measles temporarily removes the immune system, said Mina, and it has long been assumed that opportunistic infections at the time of the disease were the result of this short -term suppression.
In 2015, Mina and her colleagues published an article that examined mortality data in the United States, the United Kingdom and Denmark before and after the introduction of vaccines. They found that each time there were measles epidemics, infantile deaths of all other infectious diseases have remained significantly higher for two to three years in epidemic areas, an increase which represented up to half of all the infantile deaths caused by infectious diseases.
Once these countries have deployed the ROR vaccine, cases of measles have dropped, as expected. But the same goes for the deaths of the childhood of other infectious diseases, about half.
Three years later, Mina and her collaborators took blood samples from 77 children who are not vaccinated in a community in the Netherlands before, then two to six months after the children contracted measles. They found that the virus had wiped 11% to 73% of pre -existing antibodies of children against a multitude of pathogens.
Just as preschool children fall permanently with the current diseases they meet for the first time, unvaccinated children who contract measles are more at risk in the years that have followed for common childhood illnesses, such as Shelly Bolotin, a scientist of public health in Canada and the director of the center for the vaccine for the prevention of health diseases of the center.
“In order to correct this exhaustion (B and T cells), you must be re-exposed to everything you were immune before, and this can take years,” she said.
At the end of March, 97% of people with the current epidemic were not vaccinated or did not disclose their vaccine status. The measles virus is attenuated in the ROR vaccine, which means that it has been modified to produce the appropriate immune response without triggering the disease itself. In the case of measles, this means any massive destruction of cells that hold the memory of the immune system.
“He does not have this very, very harmful effect, which is why we recommend vaccination, because we obtain all the immunity without any negative consequences,” said Bolotin.
California Daily Newspapers
