Turns out the measles vaccine is even more important than we thought

The effectiveness of the measles vaccine has been well established, but now researchers have discovered that the vaccine may offer protective effects far beyond what we thought. Measles of course is well known as a serious and potentially fatal or disfiguring childhood illness, but studies have also shown that children appear to be at a higher risk of contracting other diseases for several months or even years after measles infection. That’s because researchers suspect measles, like several other infections and sometimes even cancer, can severely impact the body’s immune system by, in euphemistic terms, making it forget prior infections. This obviously lowers the body’s defensive capabilities and thereby puts children at risk of other, sometimes serious, diseases at a time when a child is already weak. But does the measles vaccine protect against that extra susceptibility, too? With that question in mind, researchers at Princeton University decided to analyze data from medical...