ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Measles keep spreading in West Texas. More than 250 people are reported to have contracted the disease, and the actual number is likely a lot higher. The virus has spread across the border into New Mexico. Now, this outbreak is happening in remote rural areas, so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the nationwide risk remains low and that vaccination is the key to prevention. Doctors say it's a good time to remember how dangerous and long lasting measles can be. NPR's Maria Godoy has more.
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Dr. Alex Cvijanovich has been a practicing pediatrician for more than 20 years. She says she's still haunted by the memory of a teenage boy she treated at the start of her career. The boy had contracted measles as a 7-month-old, when he was too young to be vaccinated.
ALEX CVIJANOVICH: He got the virus from a child in his neighborhood who was unvaccinated.
GODOY: It was a relatively mild case of measles, and the infant recovered. He grew up to be a healthy, bright kid.
CVIJANOVICH: He was an honors student and just a charming, delightful kid.
GODOY: Then in middle school, he started to develop troubling symptoms.
CVIJANOVICH: He started getting lost between classes - lost, like he couldn't find what class to go to next.
GODOY: Worried, the teen's parents took him to a series of doctors to figure out what was wrong until one finally suspected a condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, or SSPE. It's a degenerative neurological condition that typically develops 7 to 10 years after a measles infection. It's almost always fatal. Cvijanovich was part of the hospital team that confirmed the diagnosis.
CVIJANOVICH: The problem is that there is no treatment for it. And he basically became more and more incapacitated over time.
GODOY: She says, some 18 months later, the teenager died. SSPE was once considered quite rare. But Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who wrote a history of measles, says data from outbreaks in the U.S. over the past several decades suggest that's not the case.
ADAM RATNER: It turns out that in some age groups, especially in kids under about age 2, it's much more common than we thought.
GODOY: Perhaps as common as 1 in 5,000 cases - vaccination prevents not just SSPE but also other serious complications that measles can cause, like pneumonia and severe brain swelling. It can even erase your immune memory. Steven Elledge is a researcher at Harvard who studies how the immune system responds to pathogens.
STEVEN ELLEDGE: Not only does your brain have a memory, but your immune system has a memory of all the pathogens it's encountered in the past.
GODOY: Your immune system holds onto those memories so the next time it encounters a virus, it knows how to fight it. But measles can destroy the cells that retain those memories.
ELLEDGE: And when you lose that memory, then you're no longer immune to that particular pathogen. So the next time you get it, you've got to make - fight that battle all over again.
GODOY: This effect is called immune amnesia. Elledge says it happens to some extent with every measles infection, though its severity varies widely.
ELLEDGE: So whenever you get measles, you lose some of your immune memory. And the more severe your case of measles is, the - and the longer it lasts, the more of your immune system is destroyed.
GODOY: Some research suggests it can take two to three years for the immune system to recover. Adam Ratner says, as vaccination rates fall, the U.S. is likely to see more and larger measles outbreaks.
RATNER: There's no doubt that we will, in the future, see the long-term consequences of measles.
GODOY: But he says we have a safe and powerful tool to prevent those consequences, vaccines. Maria Godoy, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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