Measles can cause ‘immune-amnesia’

Scientists have known for decades that having measles suppresses kids’ immune systems for several weeks or months, leaving them ill-equipped to fight off pneumonia, bronchitis, diarrheal diseases and other infections.

Now a team of researchers has suggested that the measles virus may also confer a longer-lasting sort of “immune-amnesia” that makes it harder for people to stave off other illnesses for two years or more.

That re-emphasizes the importance of vaccination, said biologist Michael Mina, lead author of a paper detailing the research that was published Thursday in the journal Science.

“There may be a long-lasting impact that you can’t undo if your child gets measles,” he said. “I hope this study can impress upon people the danger measles poses.”

The researchers used what Mina called “an unconventional approach” to search for the long-lasting immune system effects. Previous work in macaque monkeys suggested that monkeys with the disease lost white blood cells their bodies had trained to fight off other illnesses, gaining new ones that were primed only to combat measles – their bodies essentially forgetting how to recognize and neutralize other pathogens and leaving them vulnerable to infection.

To test if a similar thing may occur in humans, the group mined historical data to tease out the relationship between measles incidence and deaths from other infectious diseases.

They turned to data from England and Wales – developed nations where disease levels are generally low, allowing a less-muddled view of measles’s effects. Studying measles incidence and deaths from infectious disease both before and after the introduction of the measles vaccine in the U.K. in the 1960s, Mina and the team saw a sort of shadow effect, where deaths from a variety of nonmeasles infectious diseases closely tracked measles incidence. The more measles in a population, the more deaths from other illnesses in the 28-month period that followed.

The same trend emerged when they studied similar data from the U.S. and from Denmark.

“Really it didn’t matter what age group, what decade or what country,” said Mina, a medical student at Emory University in Atlanta who worked on the study as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University in New Jersey. “They all showed consistent results. what we’re suggesting happens over the long term is that your immune system works fine, but it has forgotten what it previously learned.”

Some researchers who were not involved in the work questioned whether the reductions in deaths as measles cases declined may have had more to do with improving nutrition and smaller family size than with prolonged immune suppression. (Mina said the team did not see the same effect with rubella, suggesting that was not the case.)