Measles can result in brain damage or it can kill you. And even if you survive it, reports Debora MacKenzie (paywall) at NewScientist (16 May 2015),
The measles virus kills white blood cells that have a “memory” of past infections and so give you immunity to them. Those cells were assumed to bounce back because new ones appear a week or two after someone recovers.
However, recent work in monkeys shows that these new memory cells only remember measles itself; the monkeys lost cells that recognise other infections. If humans get similar “immune amnesia”, childhood deaths from infectious diseases should rise and fall depending on how many children had measles recently, and how long the effect lasts, says Michael Mina of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Human models are better than monkey models, but they’re close enough that this is worth worrying about – if you don’t have a vaccination already. So if you’re an anti-vaxxers kid, and you get measles, now you can count on repeating all those other diseases to which you thought you’d acquired immunity. The hard way.
