Measles Wipes Your Immune System's 'Memory,' So It Can't Fight Other Infections
Measles Wipes Your Immune System's 'Memory,' So It Can't Fight Other Infections
By Nicoletta Lanese - Staff Writer 6 hours ago Health
Two new studies detail how the measles virus causes "immune amnesia."
The notorious measles virus not only makes people sick, it also sneaks inside important immune cells in the body and wipes their "memories," new research suggests.
Once infected, the amnesic immune system no longer recognizes the harmful pathogens that it has fought off in the past. This means measles survivors can remain susceptible to dangerous diseases — such as the flu and pneumonia — for years to come, despite having weathered their initial illness.
"Measles essentially takes away their ability to efficiently protect themselves," said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University and co-author of the new study, published today (Oct. 31) in the journal Science. The paper pairs with another published today in Science Immunology. Using data from a group of unvaccinated children in the Netherlands, both studies revealed what scientists have long suspected: that the measles virus cripples the immune system in a profound and lasting way.
"What this has done is document exactly how that immunosuppression takes place, and gives us a sense of how broad that immunosuppression can be," said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious disease at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the work. The findings also serve as a reminder that this year's record-breaking measles outbreaks in the U.S. will have lingering effects, Schaffner added.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/measles-wipes-immune-memory.html
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The claim is that if you acquire immunity to some disease and then contract measles, there's a very good chance that you'll lose the prior immunity. Then you could become infected with that "some disease" again and become immune again.
This isn't the first time that this claim's been aired, with pretty good (and similar) evidence. What's new here isn't the what ("people tend to lose previously acquired immunity"
but the how of the process of immunity lose and immune system reset.
That study is here.
Figure 1 from that study gives some idea as to the data they used - if you go to the study, you can blow up figure 1 for some clarification of the details:
Measles incidence, nonmeasles infectious disease mortality, and measles-induced immunomodulation
Nonmeasles infectious disease mortality and measles incidence time series (A to C) and regressions (E to G) are shown for England and Wales, the United States, and Denmark. The vertical dashed lines in (A) to (C) indicate the year of introduction of the measles vaccine. (D) Measles-induced lymphopenia and subsequent measles-specific lymphocyte expansion in the weeks after MV infection, as described in (17, 23), are shown, and time is extended to depict hypothesized long-term immunomodulatory effects of MV infection and reconstitution of the immune response through individual exposures. Scatter plots and best-fit regression curves (plotted with 95% confidence bands) are shown for nonmeasles infectious disease mortality versus measles incidence for England and Wales (E), the United States (F), and Denmark (G).
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To assess the underlying immunological hypothesis (Fig. 1D) using population-level data, we required that first, nonmeasles mortality should be correlated with measles incidence data, especially because the onset of vaccination reduces the latter. Second, an immune memory loss mechanism should present as a strengthening of this association when measles incidence data are transformed to reflect an accumulation of previous measles cases (a measles “shadow”). For example, if immune memory loss (or more broadly, immunomodulation) lasts 3 years, the total number of immunomodulated individuals (S) in the nth quarter can be calculated as the sum of the measles cases (M) over the previous (and current) 12 quarters: Sn = Mn?11 + Mn?10 + …+ Mn?1 + Mn. In practice, we weighted the quarters using a gamma function. Dividing S by the total population of interest thus provides the prevalence of immunomodulation (see SM 2, and 3; fig. S1, A to C; and movie S1 for detailed methods). Third, the strength of this association should be greatest when the mean duration over which the cases are accumulated matches the mean duration required to restore immunological memory after MV infection. Fourth, the estimated duration should be consistent both with the available evidence of increased risk of mortality after MV, compared with uninfected children, and with the time required to build a protective immune repertoire in early life (Fig. 1D, fig. S2, and SM 5 and 6).
To explicitly address whether the observed nonspecific benefits of vaccination can be attributed to the prevention of MV immunomodulation, evidence for the four hypotheses must be present separately within the pre-vaccine eras.
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Just before figure 1, the study contains a link to Supplementary Materials which provides materials and methods for the data manipulation - there is a text document and 3 videos.
