measles virus
Measles signs and symptoms appear 10 to 14 days after exposure to the virus. Signs and symptoms of measles typically include:
Fever
Dry cough
Runny nose
Sore throat
Inflamed eyes (conjunctivitis)
Tiny white spots with bluish-white centers on a red background found inside the mouth on the inner lining of the cheek — also called Koplik’s spots
A skin rash made up of large, flat blotches that often flow into one another
The infection occurs in sequential stages over a period of two to three weeks.
Infection and incubation. For the first 10 to 14 days after you’re infected, the measles virus incubates. You have no signs or symptoms of measles during this time.
Nonspecific signs and symptoms. Measles typically begins with a mild to moderate fever, often accompanied by a persistent cough, runny nose, inflamed eyes (conjunctivitis) and sore throat. This relatively mild illness may last two or three days.
Acute illness and rash. The rash consists of small red spots, some of which are slightly raised. Spots and bumps in tight clusters give the skin a splotchy red appearance. The face breaks out first, particularly behind the ears and along the hairline.Over the next few days, the rash spreads down the arms and trunk, then over the thighs, lower legs and feet. At the same time, fever rises sharply, often as high as 104 to 105.8 F (40 to 41 C). The measles rash gradually recedes, fading first from the face and last from the thighs and feet.
Communicable period. A person with measles can spread the virus to others for about eight days, starting four days before the rash appears and ending when the rash has been present for four days.
Causes
The cause of measles is a virus that replicates in the nose and throat of an infected child or adult.
When someone with measles coughs, sneezes or talks, infected droplets spray into the air, where other people can inhale them. The infected droplets may also land on a surface, where they remain active and contagious for several hours.
You can contract the virus by putting your fingers in your mouth or nose or rubbing your eyes after touching the infected surface.
Complications
Complications of measles (or the vaccine) may include:
Ear infection. One of the most common complications of measles is a bacterial ear infection.
Bronchitis, laryngitis or croup. Measles may lead to inflammation of your voice box (larynx) or inflammation of the inner walls that line the main air passageways of your lungs (bronchial tubes).
Pneumonia. Pneumonia is a common complication of measles. People with compromised immune systems can develop an especially dangerous variety of pneumonia that is sometimes fatal.
Encephalitis. About 1 in 1,000 people with measles develops encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain that may cause vomiting, convulsions, and, rarely, coma or even death. Encephalitis can closely follow measles, or it can occur months later.
The vaccine used for Mumps is the MMRV
MMRV vaccine side-effects
(Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Varicella)
What are the risks from MMRV vaccine?
A vaccine, like any medicine, is capable of causing serious problems, such as severe allergic reactions.
Mild problems
Fever (about 1 child out of 5).
Mild rash (about 1 child out of 20).
Swelling of glands in the cheeks or neck (rare).
If these problems happen, it is usually within 5-12 days after the first dose. They happen less often after the second dose.
Moderate problems
Seizure caused by fever (about 1 child in 1,250 who get MMRV), usually 5-12 days after the first dose. They happen less often when MMR and varicella vaccines are given at the same visit as separate shots (about 1 child in 2,500 who get these two vaccines), and rarely after a 2nd dose of MMRV.
Temporary low platelet count, which can cause a bleeding disorder (about 1 child out of 40,000).
Severe problems (very rare)
Several severe problems have been reported following MMR vaccine, and might also happen after MMRV. These include severe allergic reactions (fewer than 4 per million), and problems such as:
Deafness.
Long-term seizures, coma, lowered consciousness.
Permanent brain damage.
How well does the Measles vaccine work?
Measles inclusion-body encephalitis caused by the vaccine strain of measles virus.
We report a case of measles inclusion-body encephalitis (MIBE) occurring in an apparently healthy 21-month-old boy 8.5 months after measles-mumps-rubella vaccination. He had no prior evidence of immune deficiency and no history of measles exposure or clinical disease. During hospitalization, a primary immunodeficiency characterized by a profoundly depressed CD8 cell count and dysgammaglobulinemia was demonstrated. A brain biopsy revealed histopathologic features consistent with MIBE, and measles antigens were detected by immunohistochemical staining. Electron microscopy revealed inclusions characteristic of paramyxovirus nucleocapsids within neurons, oligodendroglia, and astrocytes. The presence of measles virus in the brain tissue was confirmed by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. The nucleotide sequence in the nucleoprotein and fusion gene regions was identical to that of the Moraten and Schwarz vaccine strains; the fusion gene differed from known genotype A wild-type viruses.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10589903/
Measles research scientists have for a long time been aware of the “measles paradox.” I quote from the article by Poland & Jacobson (1994) “Failure to Reach the Goal of Measles Elimination: Apparent Paradox of Measles Infections in Immunized Persons.” Arch Intern Med 154:1815-1820:
“The apparent paradox is that as measles immunization rates rise to high levels in a population, measles becomes a disease of immunized persons.”[2]
Further research determined that behind the “measles paradox” is a fraction of the population called LOW VACCINE RESPONDERS. Low-responders are those who respond poorly to the first dose of the measles vaccine. These individuals then mount a weak immune response to subsequent RE-vaccination and quickly return to the pool of “susceptibles’’ within 2-5 years, despite being fully vaccinated.[3]
Re-vaccination cannot correct low-responsiveness: it appears to be an immuno-genetic trait.[4] The proportion of low-responders among children was estimated to be 4.7% in the USA.[5]
Studies of measles outbreaks in Quebec, Canada, and China attest that outbreaks of measles still happen, even when vaccination compliance is in the highest bracket (95-97% or even 99%, see appendix for scientific studies, Items #6&7). This is because even in high vaccine responders, vaccine-induced antibodies wane over time. Vaccine immunity does not equal life-long immunity acquired after natural exposure.
It has been documented that vaccinated persons who develop breakthrough measles are contagious. In fact, two major measles outbreaks in 2011 (in Quebec, Canada, and in New York, NY) were re-imported by previously vaccinated individuals.[6]–[7]
Taken together, these data make it apparent that elimination of vaccine exemptions, currently only utilized by a small percentage of families anyway, will neither solve the problem of disease resurgence nor prevent re-importation and outbreaks of previously eliminated diseases.
The majority of measles cases in recent US outbreaks (including the recent Disneyland outbreak) are adults and very young babies, whereas in the pre-vaccination era, measles occurred mainly between the ages 1 and 15. Natural exposure to measles was followed by lifelong immunity from re-infection, whereas vaccine immunity wanes over time, leaving adults unprotected by their childhood shots. Measles is more dangerous for infants and for adults than for school-aged children.
Despite high chances of exposure in the pre-vaccination era, measles practically never happened in babies much younger than one year of age due to the robust maternal immunity transfer mechanism. The vulnerability of very young babies to measles today is the direct outcome of the prolonged mass vaccination campaign of the past, during which their mothers, themselves vaccinated in their childhood, were not able to experience measles naturally at a safe school age and establish the lifelong immunity that would also be transferred to their babies and protect them from measles for the first year of life.
Item #6. De Serres et al. (2013) Largest measles epidemic in North America in a decade–Quebec, Canada, 2011: contribution of susceptibility, serendipity, and superspreading events. J Infect Dis 207:990-98
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23264672
“The largest measles epidemic in North America in the last decade occurred in 2011 in Quebec, Canada.”
“A super-spreading event triggered by 1 importation resulted in sustained transmission and 678 cases.”
“The index case patient was a 30-39-year old adult, after returning to Canada from the Caribbean. The index case patient received measles vaccine in childhood.”
“Provincial [Quebec] vaccine coverage surveys conducted in 2006, 2008, and 2010 consistently showed that by 24 months of age, approximately 96% of children had received 1 dose and approximately 85% had received 2 doses of measles vaccine, increasing to 97% and 90%, respectively, by 28 months of age. With additional first and second doses administered between 28 and 59 months of age, population measles vaccine coverage is even higher by school entry.”
“Among adolescents, 22% [of measles cases] had received 2 vaccine doses. Outbreak investigation showed this proportion to have been an underestimate; active case finding identified 130% more cases among 2-dose recipients.”
Item #7. Wang et al. (2014)
Difficulties in eliminating measles and controlling rubella and mumps: a cross-sectional study of a first measles and rubella vaccination and a second measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination.
PLoS One 9:e89361
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24586717
“The reported coverage of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine is greater than 99.0% in Zhejiang province. However, the incidence of measles, mumps, and rubella remains high.”
– Similarly to measles, mumps and rubella, it has been observed that naturally acquired infection with chickenpox virus protects against the development of glioma (a type of tumor that arises from glial cells in the brain or spine), reducing the risk by approximately 60%.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/154/2/161.long
Outbreak of Measles Among Persons With Prior Evidence of Immunity, New York City, 2011
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24585562
Detection of Measles Virus RNA in Urine Specimens from Vaccine Recipients
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7494055
Vaccine-associated “wild-type” measles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15804301
Case of vaccine-associated measles five weeks post-immunisation, british columbia, canada, october 2013
http://www.eurosurveillance.org/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleId=20649
Local public health response to vaccine-associated measles: case report.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23531102
Brother-to-sister transmission of measles after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2563426
Detection of measles vaccine in the throat of a vaccinated child.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11858860
Febrile seizures following measles and varicella vaccines in young children in Australia.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25444797
Nonfebrile Seizures after Mumps, Measles, Rubella, and Varicella-Zoster Virus Combination Vaccination with Detection of Measles Virus RNA in Serum, Throat, and Urine
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3697452/
Measles Vaccines Part I; Ineffectiveness of Vaccination and Unintended Consequences. ~ by Dr Viera Scheibner (PhD)
Measles vaccine introduction
Measles vaccination in the US and many other countries started in the early 1960s, at the time when measles was naturally abating and was heading for the 18 year low. That’s why the vaccine seemingly lowered the incidence; however, this was only coincidental with the natural dynamics of measles.
As one of many examples involving all infectious diseases of childhood against which vaccines have been developed, ever since any measles vaccines have been introduced and used in mass proportions, reports of outbreaks and epidemics of measles in even 100% vaccinated populations started filling pages in medical journals.
Reports of serious reactions including deaths also appeared with increasing frequency. They are the subject of a separate essay.
Atypical measles – a new phenomenon only in the vaccinated
It is less well known to the general public that vaccinated children started developing an especially vicious form of measles, due to the altered host immune response caused by the deleterious effect of the measles vaccines. It resisted all orthodox treatment and carried a high mortality rate.
It has become known as atypical measles. (AMS)
Rauh and Schmidt (1965) described nine cases of AMS which occurred in 1963 during a measles epidemic in Cincinnati. The authors followed 386 children who had received three doses of killed measles virus vaccine in 1961. Of these 386 children, 125 had been exposed to measles and 54 developed it [i.e. measles].
The new, atypical measles, occurring in the vaccinated was characterised by high fever, unusual rash and pneumonia, often with history of vaccination with killed measles vaccine.
Rauh and Schmidt (1965) concluded that, “It is obvious that three injections of killed vaccine had not protected a large percentage of children against measles when exposed within a period of two-and-a-half years after immunization”.
Destruction of transplacentally-transmitted immunity by vaccination
Many researchers warned straight after the introduction of measles vaccine in the US that the generations of children born to mothers who were vaccinated in childhood will be born with poor or no transplacentally-transmitted immunity and will contract measles and other diseases too early in life.
Lennon and Black (1986) demonstrated that “haemaglutinin-inhibiting and neutralizing antibody titers are lower in women young enough to have been immunized by vaccination than older women”. The same applied to whooping cough. It explains why so many babies before vaccination age develop these diseases, and most particularly the much publicised whooping cough.
Is there any scientific evidence of Measles being beneficial for children?
When infectious diseases of childhood are not mismanaged by the administration of antibiotics, or by suppressing fever, the diseases prime and mature the immune system and also represent developmental milestones.
Having measles not only results in life-long specific immunity to measles, but also in life-long non-specific immunity to degenerative diseases of bone and cartilage, sebaceous skin diseases, immunoreactive diseases and certain tumours as demonstrated by Ronne (1985).
Approaching childhood diseases with common sense and wisdom.
The already quoted large group of Swiss doctors that formed a working committee questioning the Swiss’ Health Department’s policy of mass vaccination with the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine, wrote that up to 1969, at the Basel University Paediatric Clinic, artificial infection with measles was used to treat successfully the nephrotic syndrome (Albonico et al. 1990).
Asthma and allergies prevented by natural measles disease.
As shown by Shaheen et al. (1996), even in a developing country having measles is beneficial: it prevents atopy: “After adjustment for breastfeeding and other variables, measles infection was associated with a large reduction in the risk of skin-prick test positivity to household dustmite . . . 17 (12.8%) of 133 participants who had had measles infection were atopic compared with 33 (25.6%) of 129 of those who had been vaccinated and not had had measles”.
Alm et al. (1999) wrote that increased prevalence of atopic disorders in children may be associated with changes in types of childhood infections, vaccination programmes, and intestinal microflora.
They found that at the Steiner schools in Sweden, “52% of the children had had antibiotics in the past, compared with 90% in the control schools…18% and 93% of children respectively, had had combined immunisation against measles, mumps, and rubella, and 61% of the children at the Steiner schools had had measles”.
“Fermented vegetables, containing live lactobacilli, consumed by 63% of the children at Steiner schools, were compared with 4.5% at the control schools….Skin-prick tests and blood tests showed that the children from Steiner schools had lower prevalence of atopy than controls”.
Engineered measles virus used in anti-cancer therapy.
Carmona Mota (1973) described a remission of infantile Hodgkin’s disease after natural measles. They wrote, “A 23-months-old Caucasian male was seen for the first time in April 1970 with a large mass in the neck due to hypertrophy of the left cervical lymph nodes. Before radiotherapy could be started the child developed measles. Much to our surprise the large cervical mass vanished without further therapy.”
Many others started researching and writing about the oncolytic (cancer-destroying) effect of measles virus.
Msaouel et al. (2009) conducted clinical testing of engineered oncolytic measles virus strains in the treatment of cancer. Even though the virus they used was a vaccine-type virus, the research was done in vitro with a virus directly injected into the tumour. They wrote, “It is of note that a number of viral strains, including certain derivatives of the attenuated live measles virus Edmonston (MV-Edm) vaccine strain, demonstrate a propensity to preferentially infect, propagate in, and destroy cancerous tissue.
The reason for using modified viruses was given as “concerns regarding the potential of wild-type-viruses to cause serious side effects, technical limitations in manufacturing viral lots of high purity for clinical use, as well as the overwhelming excitement and fervent support for the, at the time, newly emerging chemotherapy approaches that slowed down research on alternative strategies”.
One can reasonably speculate that there were also political reasons for using a vaccine measles virus (an engineered measles virus), and not the wild measles virus, because the next question to answer would be why not simply let children have the natural measles and thus achieve the long-term non-specific immunity to a number of cancers.
Do childhood diseases affect NHL and HL risk? A case-control study from northern and southern Italy.
To investigate the association between non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), and exposure to childhood diseases, we analyzed an Italian case-control study that included 225 histologically-confirmed incident cases of NHL, 62 HL cases, and 504 controls. After adjusting for confounding factors, all examined childhood diseases were negatively associated with HL. Measles was negatively associated with NHL, particularly follicular B-cell NHL. Our findings provide additional support to the hypothesis that infections by most common childhood pathogens may protect against HL or, at least, be correlated with some other early exposure, which may lower the risk of HL in adulthood. In addition, our study shows that measles may provide a protective effect against NHL.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16406019
Dose of measles virus destroys woman’s incurable cancer
fhttp://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/276966.php
Measles Outbreak among Vaccinated High School Students — Illinois
Editorial Note: This outbreak demonstrates that transmission of measles can occur within a school population with a documented immunization level of 100%. This level was validated during the outbreak investigation. Previous investigations of measles outbreaks among highly immunized populations have revealed risk factors such as improper storage or handling of vaccine, vaccine administered to children under 1 year of age, use of globulin with vaccine, and use of killed virus vaccine (1-5). However, these risk factors did not adequately explain the occurrence of this outbreak.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00000359.htm
“In 1985, 69 secondary cases, all in one generation, occurred in an Illinois high school after exposure to a vigorously coughing Index case. The school’s 1,873 students had a pre-outbreak vaccination level of 99.7% by school records.”
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/129/1/173.short
Children of mothers vaccinated against measles and, possibly, rubella have lower concentrations of maternal antibodies and lose protection by maternal antibodies at an earlier age than children of mothers in communities that oppose vaccination. This increases the risk of disease transmission in highly vaccinated populations.
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/29/infdis.jit143.long
As Vaccinated Girls Grow Up, Their Babies Face Higher Risk for Measles
“CDC figures show how this has changed the face of measles. In 1976, just 3% of all cases occurred in children under age 1. Typically their mothers were born in the 1950s, well before the measles vaccine became routinely available a decade later.
In the 1980s, as teen-agers who were vaccinated as children began to have babies, those numbers started to change. In 1985, almost 8% of measles cases were in infants younger than 1. By 1991, it had climbed to 19%. And so far this year, 28% of all measles cases have occurred in babies under a year old.”
“Dr. Mark Papania and others looked at families where infants were exposed to people with measles. They found that the babies of mothers born after 1968, when vaccination became common, were 3 1/2 times more likely to get measles than were infants of older mothers.”
http://articles.latimes.com/1992-12-27/news/mn-5079_1_measles-vaccine/2
Vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella in children.
The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate. The evidence of adverse events following immunisation with the MMR vaccine cannot be separated from its role in preventing the target diseases.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22336803
Merck Has Some Explaining To Do Over Its MMR Vaccine Claims
Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, is facing a slew of controversies over its Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine following numerous allegations of wrongdoing from different parties in the medical field, including two former Merck scientists-turned-whistleblowers. A third whistleblower, this one a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control, also promises to bring Merck grief following his confession of misconduct involving the same MMR vaccine.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/merck-whistleblowers_b_5881914.html
FURTHER READING ON MEASLES:
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