The segment begins with a British researcher’s observation that the introduction of the measles vaccine led to a significant drop in infant mortality, larger than could be accounted for by the near elimination of measles. After examining possible causes, they discovered that people (mainly kids) who got measles had substantially fewer antibodies to other diseases than people who hadn’t, or who had received the vaccine. For details listen to the episode. And bring it to the attention of your anti-vaxxer friends and relations. There is a meme out there that holds that immunity acquired from the disease is somehow better than one from the vaccine. Well, it isn’t.
I no longer bring such logical, scientific information to my anti-vaxxer friends because they are, on this subject, anyway, immune to both logic and science. If I were to show them your post and the link, they would insist theBritish researcher was secretly funded by Big Pharma. Anti-vaxxers are mostly conspiracy theorists. If science and logic could convince them, they wouldn’t be anti-vaxxers.
I admit to only scanning the paper but I don’t think there was any mention or discussion of whether measles is unique in inducing a state of 'immune amnesia". I would have speculated that other common viruses do the same, e.g. EBV, CMV.
Doesn’t take away from the point that those who prefer their kids to get their immunity ‘naturally’ are unnaturally dim.
It’s long been known that people who recovered from measles had compromised immune systems for some months or even a couple years afterwards, and it was assumed that the TB flare or (later, in 3rd world countries) the tendency to have the same infections as AIDS patients were due to the person being debilitated from the disease. We now know that it produces a type of amnesia of the immune system.
Isn’t it generally known that surviving a major viral illness depletes your resources to fight more of them for a few years? I had swine flu in 2009 (genuinely swine flu and it was a horrible experience where the only reason I didn’t get sent to hospital was because of the risk I would get more ill there) and it took me a good couple of years to properly recover. Doctors treated that as normal.
As a layperson I assume it was because my white blood cells were basically knackered from fighting swine flu, and then couldn’t fight as well against subsequent viruses, which knackered them again, until eventually I went a few weeks without exposure to viruses for long enough that my reserves were back to normal.
I think what you are talking about is different. You are talking about fatigue, which would be the case for any illness. As I understand it, what is going on with measles is that the cells that have been configured, so to speak, to fight specific illnesses are being eradicated in the body.
So, you get a vaccine for chicken pox which gets your body to develop chicken pox specific antibodies, then you get the measles, and your chicken pox antibodies are gone.
That’s different than getting the chicken pox, and now you are more likely to get strep throat because your general immune system is weaker.
It occurred to me a while back that, if there were a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical companies, it’d be on the anti-vax side. With vaccines, you get at most one shot a year, possibly once a lifetime, that’s guaranteed to be covered by insurance at negotiated low rates, and that’s it. There’s no money in that. But if you actually come down with the flu, you’ll be buying plenty of OTC remedies to get through it, at whatever out-of-pocket costs Big Pharma thinks they can get away with: Much more profitable. And they don’t even need to pay off the NIH or CDC or anything: Just drop a few spurious news stories, and the conspiracy theorists (the ones who would be most likely to uncover an actual conspiracy) do their work for them.
This applies to other vaccine-preventable diseases as well.
An outstanding example is the case of an unvaccinated Oregon child who came down with a severe case of tetanus. His medical bill approached $1 million.. Undoubtedly pharma products accounted for a good-sized chunk of that expense. Multiply such costs by, say 15 million (roughly the number of infectious disease cases we’d see annually in the U.S. without vaccination), add in indirect societal costs and it starts to look like a decent-sized chunk of money.
There may be a few Big Pharma sociopaths who dream of the vast profits they could make if they got out of the vaccine business altogether. But then the durn gummint would probably step in. :mad::(:smack:
No doubt that 15 million preventible disease cases would add up the costs, but any one tetanus case is an extreme example. The kid was in the hospital for 2 months, much of that time in intensive care and then rehab after that. Tetanus is gruesome. I’ve seen it mentioned that the full-body spasms can break bones. :eek:
And having tetanus doesn’t even leave you immune from further cases. :smack: Why does a vaccination work, but having the disease doesn’t?
I was once involved in treating a tetanus patient. We ALL agreed that we never wanted to see anything like that again. BTW, tetanus isn’t transmissible person-to-person, but diphtheria is, and having it also does not guarantee lifelong immunity. They have long had gamma globulin for acute exposures, and this is why we need boosters throughout our lifetimes.
A while back, I read about a tribe in Africa where the #1 cause of neonatal death at one time was tetanus, and Western aid workers and missionaries were puzzled as to why. They were horrified to learn that members of this this tribe placed soil from their fields on the freshly cut umbilical cord, because they believed it would make the baby grow stronger and faster! I’m sure that wherever all us Dopers came from, our ancestors had similarly incorrect beliefs.