There's a good article in the Daily Beast about vaccinations. It contains part of a public service announcement from 1986 written by children's book author Road Dahl:
Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old [in 1962]. As the illness took its usual course, I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.Another article unveils a mystery that had been baffling scientists for years:
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.
“I feel all sleepy,” she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.What caused this?
But something else happened.
Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.
[Measles] erases immune protection to other diseases, [study coauthor Michael] Mina says.If the results of this study are verified, it will mean getting vaccinated for measles will protect you from a whole host of other diseases you already had.
So what does that mean? 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.
"The immune system kind of comes back. The only problem is that it has forgotten what it once knew," he 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.
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