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WIRED
@wired.com

If anyone you know needs reminding of why vaccines are important, take a closer look at what happens if get the measles (which, if you're not vaccinated and you encounter a contagious person, you are almost guaranteed to catch). #SOTU buff.ly/W6zwuKk

wired.comHow Measles Hacks the Body—and Harms Its Victims for YearsThe virus is the most contagious in the world, exploiting the human body's immune system to spread with extreme agility and harming its victims for years.

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Londo
@londo.bsky.social

If you look at old cemeteries you see so many graves of children. Childhood diseases ravaged this little one but if you look at the cemeteries from the 1950s onward there is a reverse in the trend of childhood deaths. Vaccines were a big part of the positive change. Vaccines saved lives.

WIRED
@wired.com

It can affect some patients for years, by wiping out the body's catalog of prior infections. This means you can get sick much more often.

WIRED
@wired.com

And because it effectively hijacks your immune system, it's incredibly dangerous for people whose immune systems are already in a weakened state—cancer patients on chemotherapy, people who’ve recently had an organ transplant, elderly people, and infants. Their systems can’t bounce back.

Judanne
@judsi.bsky.social

Thanks for that, you've just cleared up a mystery. I had measles as a child, and then in my early teens I had repeated cases of strep throat, and it was the strep germ infecting my kidneys that gave me kidney failure which was diagnosed when I was 17. Luckily I've survived into my early 70's.

Judanne
@judsi.bsky.social

Thanks to Australia's wonderful health system, years of dialysis and two renal transplants. My second transplant's anniversary will be 20 years in May. And all because there was no vaccine available when I was a kid.