Dr. Adam Ratner has heard many myths and misconceptions about measles over decades as a pediatric infection expert in New York City.
The nasty intrusion to see him circulating on social media during his current outbreak is that having the virus in exchange for getting vaccinated has benefits to the immune system. This is a cell strength training program.
The truth is, “I’m totally the opposite,” Ratner said.
Measles is a highly contagious virus that can manifest as a rash or cold symptoms in many patients, leading to serious or fatal complications in other patients. The outbreak that began in West Texas in January has infected nearly 500 people in 19 states, including eight in California.
Even mild measles infections, a lesser-known result, is that patients remember the pathogens they fought previously and how those battles won. As a result, a bug that recurs with a bug that could only cause minor symptoms will result in a disease as if the patient had never encountered it before.
Measles destroys lymphocytes that protect other bugs, giving way to those that protect measles. This is achieved by immunity at the expense of other protections.
According to this “immune amnesia,” patients are vulnerable to recurrence of diseases that immune cells were able to resist before, according to doctors.
If your child gets sick with measles, “for the next two or three years you have to be like looking over your child’s shoulder, and you’re wondering if you should be very well protected otherwise,” said Dr. Michael Mina and Dr. Michael Minaina, previously an epidemiology aide who suffered from a disease at Harvard Medical School.
“If you see a mild measles virus infection and you go through it, it doesn’t mean that it was mild in your immune system,” added Mina.
He was taking rotavirus, Ratner said. Children who once had the rotavirus have antibodies that provide protection against future infections.
But measles infections are said, Ratner, author of the recent book, “Booster Shot: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future Author of Children’s Health.”
Immune amnesia is caused by a plan of attack by the measles virus. Virus particles travel through airborne droplets of saliva, mucus and cells.
From there, they pass through the protective barriers that line the respiratory system and head to the lymph nodes for cells expressing a specific protein called signaling lymphocyte-activating molecules.
The virus then rides around the bloodstream with these hijacked slum-expressing cells, further infecting and destroying other slum-type expslers they encounter along the way.
Among the slum-expressing cells that paralyze Reck, memory B and T cells are two important players, functional immune system. Memory B cells quickly produce right antibodies when familiar microorganisms appear. Memory T cells recognize and kill viruses that cells encounter in the past.
Measles infection feeds these memory cells. In contrast, vaccines stimulate the production of memory B and T cells without consuming others in the process.
This was not yet understood in the decades before approval of measles, mumps and rubella vaccines in 1963, when measles was a common pediatric disease that killed around 400 children in the United States each year.
“For over 100 years, I know that measles can cause acute susceptibility to other infectious diseases,” Mina said.
Measles infections temporarily suppress the immune system, and it has long been assumed that opportunistic infections during illness are the result of their short-term suppression.
In 2015, Mina and her colleagues published a paper examining mortality data in the US, UK and Denmark before and after the measles vaccine. They found that with each outbreak of measles, pediatric deaths from all other infectious diseases remained significantly higher for 2-3 years at the location of the outbreak.
As these countries roll out the MMR vaccine, measles cases fell, as expected. However, childhood deaths from other infectious diseases were about half of them.
Three years later, Mina and his collaborators took blood samples from 77 unvaccinated children in the Dutch community, then two to six months after the child developed measles. They found that the virus wiped out 11% to 73% of existing antibodies in children against many pathogens.
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“To fix that depletion [of B and T cells]you will need to reexpose everything you previously immune, and this can take years to come,” she said.
As of late March, 97% of people who got sick during the current outbreak either had not been vaccinated or did not disclose their status. The measles virus is attenuated with the MMR vaccine, meaning that it is changing to produce an appropriate immune response without causing the disease itself. In the case of measles, it means there is no mass destruction of cells that hold memory of the immune system.
“This is very, very ineffective, so we recommend getting vaccinated because all immunity doesn’t have a negative effect,” Borotin said.
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