DISCLAIMER: I am in no way advocating for the spreading of a highly contagious and deadly disease or the abstention from safe and highly effective vaccines. But, this is No Stupid Questions, so…

Measles is known for wiping out your immune system memory and re-endangering you to pathogens you had once successfully fought off.

Allergies are when your immune system misidentifies something harmless (like pollen or peanuts) as a harmful pathogen and triggers an immune response.

So, what happens to allergies in people who get measles? Does it wipe out the immune system’s memory of the allergen? Does it expose them to develop new allergies? Do we even know whether it does anything to allergies at all, or has it never been studied? What about other auto immune diseases?

Secondly, if it does do something, is there some way that it can be utilized to help allergy sufferers? Not in the “give people a deadly contagious disease” kind of way (I’ve heard of the tapeworm thing), but is there something there that could studied and developed into a targeted drug or treatment? Or is the mechanism just too broad and dangerous.

  • southsamurai
    4·
    3 days ago

    So, disclaimer. Not a doctor, a microbiologist, a virologist, or anything with actual first hand knowledge. So, keep a salt shaker handy to take this with.

    Since worm boy has started running his mouth, I’ve been casually reading about measles. Just enough that when some idiot echoes him that I can feel comfortable telling them to STFU and GTFO and not wasting my time trying to argue with them. So that’s kind of a second disclaimer, I guess, that I haven’t read every single line of every single publication out there.

    That being said, nah. There have been patients with measles that also had preexisting allergies, and it didn’t get rid of them. At best, they were suppressed a little during the illness.

    So far, attempts along those lines on purpose haven’t worked to an extent that it’s worth it. There was some testing done with other means of destroying the relevant immune cells, and the most effect was a temporary reduction in severity of allergic response. They eventually came back in full.

    So, assuming you want to cite a rando on the internet, if anyone starts spewing that tripe as a benefit, you can confidently tell them that I said to STFU and GTFO.