At a time when lots of Americans have been bombarded with misinformation and disinformation about childhood vaccines and vaccination in general, it has come to light that measles infections trigger lasting vulnerabilities in the immune system that cause survivors to be susceptible to lots of other infections.
For a long time, doctors have observed that when someone gets infected with measles and the condition is successfully treated, that person tends to get infected with a variety of other diseases for several years, sometimes even their entire lifetime. Measles outbreaks have even been known to be early predictors of subsequent waves of other diseases.
In 2012, researchers coined the term “immune amnesia” to explain what happens when a person is infected with measles and later exhibits vulnerability to other infections. The researchers found that when the virus that causes measles enters the body, it causes a lot more damage than is visible through the rash, fevers and other observable symptoms.
The virus destroys memory cells in the immune system after hijacking them. It takes over, and then destroys those memory cells, causing immune amnesia. The effect of this immune amnesia is that our bodies are no longer able to recognize pathogens like bacteria and viruses that the body had previously developed antibodies for.
Under normal circumstances, the body accumulates an arsenal of antibodies through the different infections it fights off and the vaccines that are administered over the years. This bank of antibodies is useful because when a similar infection shows up, the memory cells quickly awaken the relevant antibodies and the immune system easily fights off the infection.
When the memory bank is wiped clean by the measles virus, the body is no longer able to remember how it previously combated an earlier infection, and the affected person becomes prone to serious complications from an infection that now appears new to the body and yet, in reality, the body had previously dealt with that infection successfully.
This phenomenon of immune amnesia explains why a child who suffers from measles at age five, for example, suffers from severe flu every flu season, and that person seems to become a magnet for every infection that breaks out in the community. Those subsequent infections take hold easily because the body’s immune system has lost its memory of how to fight common infections.
These discoveries highlight how urgent and important it is for policy makers to counter misinformation and disinformation about vaccines. Anti-vaxxers are doing plenty of harm to communities because every skipped vaccination increases the likelihood of a measles outbreak taking hold and leaving lots of people with immune amnesia.
Public awareness campaigns need to be stepped up to boost vaccine uptake and protect communities against the long-term effects of measles infections. At the same time, there is a need for firms like Co-Diagnostics Inc. (NASDAQ: CODX) to accelerate their development of decentralized testing equipment so that any infection can be diagnosed quickly and treatment administered. This will reduce the hardships experienced by people who suffered immune amnesia and are now prone to every infection that they are exposed to.
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