But for the next two to three years, they remain unusually vulnerable to other infections, from viruses like the common cold and influenza to potentially deadly bacteria that can cause pneumonia or swelling in the brain.
After children with measles recover from the rash and fevers, they are highly unlikely to fall ill with it again. The work sheds new light on the biological basis for a phenomenon long recognized by doctors. Or he might sustain an injury from which it takes months or years to recover.
An unvaccinated child who weathers the measles may emerge only slightly the worse from such a crash. “The measles virus is like a car accident for your immune system,” said Harvard University geneticist Stephen Elledge,the senior author of the Science study. In two of 19 measles-infected children tested, the machinery that supplies the immune system with new disease-targeting cells was profoundly disrupted, raising questions about whether they would fully recover their previous strength. For weeks after the unvaccinated children had recovered, their depleted stocks of B-cells signaled a loss of strength to defend against new infections, according to a report in Thursday’s edition of Science Immunology.įor some, the damage appeared to be even more extensive. Measles appeared to have stripped away the immune protections built up over years of exposure to diseases and germs, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.Ī second research team measured the same children’s immune memory 40 days after measles infection and found significant shrinkage in their stores of B-cells, which fight disease by killing infected cells and spawning legions of antibodies to confront viral invaders in the blood.
A genetic census of antibodies - immune proteins that recognize and destroy invading microbes - showed that those children had lost at least some immunity to more than 40% of the microbes that cause common childhood diseases, including influenza, rhinovirus and respiratory syncytial virus.
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