Hypothesis: Measles Erases Immune System Memory
“We found measles predisposes children to all other infectious diseases for up to a few years,” Mina says.
And the virus seems to do it in a sneaky way.
.. Well, say you get the chicken pox when you’re 4 years old. Your immune system figures out how to fight it. So you don’t get it again. But if you get measles when you’re 5 years old, it could wipe out the memory of how to beat back the chicken pox. It’s like the immune system has amnesia, Mina says.
.. So after an infection, a child’s immune system has to almost start over, rebuilding its immune protection against diseases it has already seen before.
This idea of “immune amnesia” is still just a hypothesis and needs more testing, says epidemiologist William Moss, who has studied the measles vaccine for more than a decade at Johns Hopkins University.