After an acute illness, the measles virus can sometimes remain in the body and cause dangerous diseases many years later. (Photo courtesy of KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images)
Measles kills between 1 and 3 out of every 1,000 children exposed to the viral disease. But even those who survive the disease can face serious long-term consequences. The immune system is compromised long after recovery from the acute illness—in rare cases, the measles virus can hide in the nervous system and reactivate, causing dangerous illnesses years later.
In the short term, measles, caused by a highly contagious virus, typically presents with fever, respiratory symptoms such as cough, and a distinctive rash that starts at the hairline and spreads down the body. It feels like “a bucket of rash” being dumped on your head, says Patsy Stinchfield, an infectious disease nurse practitioner and recent president of the nonprofit National Association of Infectious Diseases (NFID).
Because the two-dose measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is 97% effective at preventing measles, many U.S. health experts have never encountered the disease, which is now causing a major outbreak in Texas and neighboring states, Live Science reports. Measles cases were so rare in the U.S. that the disease was declared eradicated in 2000.
However, in 2017, Stinchfield responded to a measles outbreak in Minnesota that sickened many children.
“The kids who come into the emergency room and go home even look like rag dolls on their parents' shoulders,” Stinchfield told Live Science. “They're miserable.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1 in 5 children who get measles will be hospitalized, and 1 in 20 will develop pneumonia, which is the leading cause of death among children who die from the disease. Stinchfield noted that some of those hospitalized children will need to be placed on a ventilator to recover.
In about 1 in 1,000 cases, measles can cause swelling of the brain, or encephalitis, which can cause seizures. Even if it doesn't cause death, the swelling may go away, but it can cause permanent brain damage and other long-term effects, such as blindness or deafness.
“Immune amnesia”
Even patients with mild cases of measles may experience long-term side effects.
Measles binds to a receptor that is found, by chance, on several important immune cells: T cells, B cells, and long-lived plasma cells. These cells “remember” previous infections for decades, allowing the immune system to respond quickly if it encounters the pathogen again.
This is due to the production of protective proteins known as antibodies, as well as the recruitment of other immune system defenders. However, a 2019 study showed that after contracting measles, people lose between 11% and 73% of the antibodies they had produced to previous infections.
To recover from this so-called immune amnesia, a person would have to be reinfected with all of those diseases, said Stephen Elledge, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and senior author of the 2019 study. That means they become vulnerable to multiple infections after having measles.
What's more, a 2015 study led by Elledge's colleague, epidemiologist Dr. Michael Min, found that children who contract measles have higher rates of death from other infectious diseases in subsequent years.
These infectious diseases, including measles, were the main reason why in 1900 in the United States
Sourse: www.livescience.com
