Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccooffee | Hacker News Reader

Here's a 2019 article, "Study suggests how measles depletes body’s immune memory"[0] which (despite the title) seems to quantify the percentage of antibody arsenal that is lost after a measles infection. Sadly, I haven't had luck finding resources to answer "by what mechanism does measles cause antibody memory to be lost?", but I've got a good thing to ponder for the weekend. Thanks. :)

[0] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/10/how-measles-w...

View on HN

Here you go: https://asm.org/Articles/2019/May/Measles-and-Immune-Amnesia

Very short version: it infects the tissue that create the cells that contain or immune memory, replacing them with versions that only know about the measles virus. Sounds like it's not permanent, though the article doesn't make it clear whether it's recovery or re-learning.

Our immune system is quite aggressive with garbage collection and can picky about what pathogens it chooses to remember. This behaviour makes sense on the hypothesis that our immune system has a "storage limit" for immunities. It doesn't make sense if the immunity memory is unlimited.

(The reason why many vaccines require boosters is that without the repeat exposure, our immune system decides it doesn't need to remember about that particular pathogen.)

Also, HIV depletes your T cells

And SARS-CoV-2, unfortunately.

?? 99.9% of people recover just fine and surely they still have their T cells

How confident are you in your position? Literally 30 seconds spent searching: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41418-022-00936-x

I've only skimmed it, but doesn't the article you linked indicate that it is only true for severe/ life-threatening cases of COVID-19?

Doesn't matter, it shows that covid can deplete t-cells as claimed up-thread.

extreme cases of covid is not relevant for 99.9% of people so that's sufficiently close enough to say your claim is exaggerated. Sure, colds can kill too, but we don't treat them the same as Ebola.

The claim that a thing happens is not invalidated by it's relative frequency. You don't get to pretend lightning doesn't exist despite the relative rarity of people being hit by it.

It’s probably a waste of breath on this forum at this point, but look it up, and how long it takes even HIV infected individuals to become clinically immunodeficient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com