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.
That’s a really interesting question. I have no idea, but I’d be interested to read what someone with relevant knowledge had to say about it.