“The biggest takeaway of this study is that measles is really much more detrimental to the immune system and overall childhood health than we had previously recognized,” says Mina. So what does this mean for parents and others concerned about keeping their kids healthy in the U.S.? According to the experts, a great deal. “In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, those children will have even greater consequences of measles - potentially losing much greater fractions of their pre-existing antibodies and immune memory,” Mina says.
He notes that these results may be even worse for children in developing countries, where measles remain a major cause of death. “The most surprising results here were definitely the sheer magnitude of the ‘immune amnesia’ effect - even among previously healthy children who had even fairly mild measles infections,” Mina tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “It’s a tamed virus.”įor Mina, the outcome was not entirely expected. “The measles vaccine virus does not do this,” he says. Schaffner says that it’s the resurgence of the infection - especially among certain religious groups - that’s allowed researchers to conduct studies like this one as the same effect does not result from the vaccine itself.
Although the link has been thoroughly disproven by doctors, the fear that vaccines are dangerous remains - prompting thousands of schools to drop below the recommended vaccination rate this year and the CDC to record the highest number of measles cases since 1992. The movement, which continues to gain steam, is often connected to a now-retracted 1998 paper in The Lancet by British researcher Andrew Wakefield, which claimed to find a link between vaccines and autism. saw a surge of cases in 2014, following the rise of a new anti-vaccination movement. Since 2000, the vaccine has been credited with saving 21 million lives worldwide and reducing deaths by 80 percent, according to the World Health Organization.īut after years without measles, the U.S. Thanks to the vaccine, measles was officially declared eliminated from the U.S. Each year, as many as 48,000 were hospitalized, 400 to 500 died and 1,000 suffered severe swelling of the brain called encephalitis. “We hypothesized that such an immune-amnesia effect might exist to explain the long ‘shadow of death’ that we saw after measles epidemics in the pre-vaccine era,” Mina tells Yahoo Lifestyle.īefore the creation of the measles vaccination in 1963 - according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - an estimated three to four million people became infected with measles annually. Mina, MD, PhD, one of the lead authors on the study, tells Yahoo Lifestyle the results confirmed a hypothesis first floated in a Science paper he co-authored in 2015, which showed that children who developed the measles had increased mortality for two to three years after their recovery. “We've never known the mechanism for this.” “It seems to be that the measles virus itself attacks and destroys - it kills some of the immune cells,” Schaffner says of the studies, which were funded by the National Institutes of Health, Gates Foundation, Value of Vaccination Research Network and other organizations. The monkeys who were infected with the measles showed a 40 to 60 percent decrease in their antibodies afterward. It’s a phenomenon that the researchers refer to as “immune amnesia.” The concept was replicated in a second similar study, published this week in the journal Science Immunology, which found the same mechanism at work in macaque monkeys. Through VirScan, the researchers tested the immune function of the children who had gotten measles and found up to 73 percent of their antibodies were eliminated. Their immune systems were tested before and after getting measles through what’s called VirScan, a blood test developed by Harvard researcher, and by the lead author on the study, Stephen J. The research, published in the journal Science on Friday, followed 77 children in the Netherlands who were unvaccinated due to religious reasons.
“But these studies have documented why that occurs - and have given us insight into how long it can affect an individual.” “We've known that measles itself can cause immune suppression,” William Schaffner, MD, a professor in the division of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Chan School of Public Health has provided evidence of something epidemiologists have long suspected - that measles may have the potential to nearly wipe out a person’s immune system, leaving them susceptible to other illnesses such as influenza. (Photo: Getty Images)Ī new study from the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health released a study showing that those with measles are more susceptible to other illness afterward.
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