Reuters, LONDONGetting measles is even more dangerous than doctors had realized, because it destroys immunity that the victim has acquired to other diseases, researchers said on Thursday. The findings help to explain why children often catch other infectious diseases after having measles and underscore the dangers of growing resistance to childhood vaccination in some countries, two studies published simultaneously said. “This ... is a direct demonstration in humans of ‘immunological amnesia,’ where the immune system forgets how to respond to infections encountered before,” said Velislava Petrova of Britain’s Wellcome Sanger Institute and Cambridge University, who co-led one of the studies. “The [measles] virus is much more deleterious than we realized, which means the vaccine is that much more valuable,” Elledge said. For this research, the two teams looked at a group of unvaccinated people in the Netherlands to find out what measles does to the immune system.

Source: Taipei Times November 01, 2019 16:07 UTC