For most children who are stricken with measles, the illness causes some discomfort for several days before clearing up, seemingly without having any serious or long term effects.
New research suggests this may be wrong, a revelation which may add fuel to the already raging debate over vaccinations, specifically the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine which a rising number of parents are choosing to not have administered to their children.
The measles saw a resurgence this year, with the most reported cases of measles since 1994. Measles popped back up in places where it had previously been considered eradicated, worrying global health officials. But anti-vaxxer parents dismissed their concerns, arguing that measles is simply an annoying childhood illness with no lasting effects. Two new studies strongly suggest that they are wrong.
After the measles vaccine was introduced in the US in the 1960’s, researchers noticed that rates of childhood deaths from other diseases fell sharply, a fact they could not account for. New scientific evidence may help explain it. Recently published studies provide an explanation: measles is not simply an illness which comes and goes; it can damage the immune system by erasing the immune system’s memory of antigens which it had previously encountered. When we become ill, our bodies keep a “blueprint” of the disease, allowing it to more easily defeat it if it sees it again. This, in fact, is the basis for vaccinations in the first place. When stricken with measles, a child’s body can apparently suffer “immune amnesia,” with the body “forgetting” how to identify other illnesses. This leaves children more susceptible to becoming seriously, even fatally, sick from illnesses unrelated to measles.
Medical authorities say that the studies show that the measles vaccine is more crucial to the health of a child than previously understood, As one researcher put it, the vaccine acts as a seatbelt for the immune system, providing protection not only from the measles, but from other illnesses the immune system encounters as well.
The new evidence suggests that depriving children of the MMR vaccine does not only put the already immunosuppressed at risk of contracting measles which may be life-threatening for them, it actually puts the unvaccinated child at greater risk of becoming seriously ill from other diseases as well.
Does measles suppress your immune system via immune amnesia? Let’s do some ‘fact-checking.’
In 2002, Dr. Peter Aaby and co-authors published a study conducted in rural Senegal, in the area which had an outbreak of measles. According to the study: “No index or secondary case of measles died in the acute phase of infection nor did any of the children exposed to measles die in the first 2 months after exposure.” (And given what we know from the 2015 Lancet Global Health publication, identifying vitamin A deficiency as a risk factor for mortality from measles, we can safely assume that perhaps children in this area were not as deficient in vitamin A, as children in other parts of Africa and Asia, where measles infection is known to result in high mortality.)
Dr. Aaby and co-authors were testing a commonly held assumption that after surviving measles, children would have a higher mortality rate from other infections due to long-term immune-suppression, which is thought to follow measles. But they got the opposite results. In fact, they found that: “Exposed children developing clinical measles had lower age-adjusted mortality over the next 4 years than exposed children who did not develop clinical measles.”
Why then all this recent hysteria about measles resulting in immune amnesia, as if that’s going to kill you?
There are a few research publications that have been picked up by the media or referenced by other research publications to unnecessarily feed these fears.
Let’s first look at the PLoS Pathology 2012 publication titled “Measles immune suppression: lessons from the macaque model.”
Researchers state: “Here we show that MV preferentially infects CD45RA(-) memory T-lymphocytes and follicular B-lymphocytes, resulting in high infection levels in these populations. After the peak of viremia MV-infected lymphocytes were cleared within days… Our findings indicate an immune-mediated clearance of MV-infected CD45RA(-) memory T-lymphocytes and follicular B-lymphocytes, which causes temporary immunological amnesia.”
OK, here we have a preferential infection of memory lymphocytes by the measles virus resulting in a temporary loss of immunologic memory. So what? When was it ever proven that immunologic memory has anything to do with protection from re-infection? In fact, the opposite has been demonstrated by the research conducted in the lab of Swiss scientist Dr. Rolf Zinkernagel, who won the Nobel Prize in 1996. In the title of his 2012 review, he clearly states: “Immunologic memory does not equal protective immunity.”
Furthermore, the varicella (chickenpox) virus does exactly the same thing as the measles virus – it infects memory lymphocytes, as revealed in another research paper published in PLoS Pathology in 2013: “During viremia the virus preferentially infected memory T-cells, initially central memory T-cells and subsequently effector memory T-cells.”
Yet, no one is screaming from rooftops that chickenpox will make you die from the next common cold you contract. Perhaps, that would be too obvious a lie to all the chickenpox survivors who do not remember suffering from any type of immune-suppression, despite the fact that the varicella virus infected their memory T cells. But because the vaccine-measles generation has nearly completely taken the place of the natural-measles generation, the media can get away with spreading such fears without common sense to stop them.
Another paper published recently in Science is titled “Measles virus infection diminishes preexisting antibodies that offer protection from other pathogens.”
‘Antibodies that offer protection’? Let’s pause right here. When was it ever proven that antibodies offer protection? In fact, the opposite has been observed. Don’t we remember another famous immunologist and a 1960 Nobel Prize winner Sir Macfarlane Burnet telling us the following regarding the role of antibodies (or rather lack thereof) for immunity in children who lacked antibody production due to a genetic condition called agammaglobulinemia:
“To everyone’s surprise [children with agammaglobulinemia] showed a normal measles course with a typical rash which faded at the normal time and was followed by just as substantial immunity against reinfection as would be shown by any other convalescent. Antibody production is therefore not necessary either for recovery from or for the development of immunity to measles.” (Burnet and White. Natural History of Infectious Disease. Cambridge University Press, 1940)
And don’t we know of a modern-day paper showing that medical professionals with positive antibody titers for measles can still develop measles:
“Hospital employees working in patient care areas from July through November 1990 were screened for measles antibody levels using a commercially available enzyme immunoassay (EIA). Four healthcare workers vaccinated in the past developed measles. All had positive pre-illness measles antibody levels.”
Then who cares what is temporarily happening with antibodies that bind to other pathogens after measles infection?
A true correlate of protection is not the level of antibodies that bind to pathogens but virus- neutralizing serum titers. Those are measured by a technique called plaque-reduction neutralization, which is quite distinct from how antibodies are detected. When measured side by side using the same serum samples from research animals, virus-neutralizing measurements and antibody-binding titers do not follow the same pattern over time and therefore do not measure the same entity.
Before we start panicking over the demonstrated effects of the measles infection on the temporary loss of immunologic memory or diminished levels of virus-binding antibodies, let’s ask ourselves: do we even fully understand the biological basis of immunity from viral re-infection? Is the science really settled here? Because it doesn’t appear so to me.
Over the past century, the immunologic theory has been vacillating back and forth between holding a cell-based vs. humoral-based view of immunity. That debate was futile, because the majority of immunologic research has been done with non-infectious immunogenic substances that couldn’t really test the theory in action.
In 1942, Dr. Merrill Chase postulated that immunity could be transferred with immune cells from immunized animals to naïve animals.
In 1995, Dr. Zinkernagel’s research disproved that, showing that immunologic transfer of memory cells didn’t confer protection, when animals were then challenged with a virus. But the transfer of serum from immune animals did confer protection, which to Dr. Zinkernagel implied that protective immunity is in serum-derived antibodies.
Yet, back in the 1940s, Dr. Burnet already knew that it could not be the case, because of his clinical observations in agammaglobulinemic patients who lacked antibodies, yet could generate immunity to a childhood disease, like measles.
So, which is it: cell-based, antibody-based, or neither? And what is missing from the picture?
And what is missing in immunologic debate is a cell-derived factor called Transfer Factor. TF was discovered in the 1950s by Henry Sherwood Lawrence.
In 1980, a seminal clinical research paper was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, showing that TF administered to children with leukemia in a double-blind saline placebo-controlled trial protected them from chickenpox during 12-30 months of the follow-up.
In this clinical trial, TF was prepared by extracting (dializing) it from leukocytes of donors who had a history of chickenpox. Researchers had to kill those leukocytes in order to extract TF out of them. And most likely, those were memory lymphocytes that contained TF, since it had to be obtained from people who already had chickenpox.
Let’s get back to the known propensity of the measles virus to infect and kill memory lymphocytes. Could it be that rather than making you less immune by killing your memory lymphocytes, the measles infection would make you more immune by killing your memory lymphocytes—due to releasing TF from all of those killed memory lymphocytes into your bloodstream? Did scientists measure the levels of the serum TF to previously encountered infections before and after measles, the way they did for antibodies? I bet, no. Because that would put an end to the spread of the panic. And that wouldn’t be good for vaccine business and for vaccine mandates.
And let’s address yet another facet of memory lymphocytes. A subset of them (memory Th2) is known to be an immunologic reservoir for atopic/allergic diseases, including asthma. In fact, it was even proposed in a 2006 publication in the Pharmacologic Theory journal that drugs are needed to target and kill these pesky memory Th2 cells, in order to reduce their contribution to asthma.
And if the measles and chickenpox viruses already do just that–kill memory T cells–shouldn’t that lead to a reduced risk of asthma and other atopic diseases? Indeed, it should. And here are some publications documenting such effects for measles in Africa and Europe, and for chickenpox in the USA.
Let’s re-read the conclusion of Dr. Aaby’s study and let it sink in: ‘Exposed children developing clinical measles had lower age-adjusted mortality over the next 4 years than exposed children who did not develop clinical measles.”
Are you still afraid?
Could we put this whole thing to bed already? Please! Nobody’s opinion is being changed at this point (if there ever was a time that there was hope for that).