Can measles prevent the development of atopic allergies?

News from “the Lancet”

Heinz Wittwer, Switzerland

It is a widespread experience, that an infectious disease in childhood can be favourable to the child’s general development. A study recently published in the medical journal “The Lancet” now suggests, that people who did not undergo a measles infection are at higher risk to develop an atopic allergy.(1) This for the first time is a hint, that childhood diseases could also have very distinct beneficial effects.  The study was done among the indigenous population of a semi-rural part of Guinea-Bissau, a small state south of Senegal, West Africa. The people there are living in multi-family houses made of mud-bricks, that sometimes were even shared with pigs. Between 1978 and 1980 there had been a campaign of nutrition and child health, during which small children were registered and vaccinated against measles in case they had not had them yet. In 1994 those individuals still living in the same area were tested for atopy by applying the seven most common antigens with a skin-prick test. Analysis of the results showed, that atopic allergy (mostly against house dust mites) was only half as frequent in the group of those young adults who had had measles in early childhood (17 cases of atopy among those 133 participants who had had measles, compared with 33 cases among 129 vaccinated participants, who didn’t have the infection). In accordance with studies conducted elsewhere in the world the risk of atopy in Guinea-Bissau was also related to a shorter period of breast feeding and a higher socioeconomic status. When the results were corrected for these two potentially confounding variables, the correlation between measles infection and low risk of atopy became even stronger.

One could suspect, that the higher incidence of atopy among vaccinated individuals might be a negative effect of the vaccination itself.  Probable damage to the immune system by measles vaccination is being discussed even by the allopathic community (see Homoeopathic Links 4/94, p. 41), but a study conducted in Great Britain failed to give a correlation between atopy and measles vaccination. So most probably we are facing here a true benefit of measles infection.  Could it be that an infectious disease in early childhood helps to prevent the development of an atopic allergy? The study in Guinea-Bissau seems to tell us so. The same hypothesis is also supported by the findings of German epidemiologists, that the risk of atopy is decreasing as the number of siblings a child grew up with is increasing (potential sources of infection!). It is still to early for a definite answer, but it looks as if the price for the presently tempted eradication of the typical childhood diseases might be higher than expected. Maybe we soon will all be longing back to the good old times of measles again.

Heinz Wittwer

Schöneggplatz 1

8004 Zürich, Switzerland

Bibliography:  1.  Lancet, Vol. 347, p. 1792-96 (1996) and references cited therein.

 

 

 

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