#viruses – @ysabet on Tumblr

ysabet reblogged

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.

But something else happened.

Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.

“So it’s really been a mystery — why do children stop dying at such high rates from all these different infections following introduction of the measles vaccine,” says Michael Mina, a postdoc in biology at Princeton University and a medical student at Emory University.

Scientists Crack A 50-Year-Old Mystery About The Measles Vaccine Photo credit: Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

jessicalprice

Using computer models, they found that the number of measles cases in these countries predicted the number of deaths from other infections two to three years later.

“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.

Like many viruses, measles is known to suppress the immune system for a few weeks after an infection. But previous studies in monkeys have suggested that measles takes this suppression to a whole new level: It erases immune protection to other diseases, Mina says.

VACCINATE. YOUR. DAMN. KIDS.

Everyone please re-blog this. It’s very important.

@takashi0 You re-blogging things tends to get them spread far and wide. Please help us out on this one.

fittingoutjane

Fun and exciting news! COVID does the same thing, although in a different way. Had COVID a while ago and keep getting sick with everything else? This is why.

COVID weakens the immune system for several months. This is why we’re seeing outbreaks of weird fungal infections in adults, more TB worldwide, mycoplasmic pneumonia outbreaks filling hospitals, plus more children getting severely ill from RSV and strep.

Wear. A. Mask. If you haven’t had COVID, keep it that way. If you have, you are immune-compromised and you really want to avoid catching COVID again, or getting anything else.

bulletstapes

Since I’ve had COVID (multiple times, despite my best efforts), I’ve been getting colds rougly 2–3x more than before, some really nasty ones that knocked me down like a flu, and all my colds have taken twice as long as before. And I used to have a really good immune system before, rarely ever got sick.

And since I’ve been keeping up with the vax and wearing a mask everywhere and testing regularly, I’m reasonably certain those were really just colds that fucked over my COVID-weakened immune system, not additional COVID re-infections.

fittingoutjane

In 2022, I had my 11th surgery, which was less dangerous and less extensive than most of the others. It was healing quite well a couple weeks later, then I got COVID.

Then I got a wound infection. Never had a surgical infection before in my life, and it shouldn’t have happened that late in the healing process, but it did.

Now, these are anecdotes, but the data is there, basically every other kind of infection has grown more common and more serious since COVID started to spread out of control.

Source: NPR

#COVID #viruses #vaccines #meatpuppets