Why Adults Are More Likely To Be Hit Hard By The Measles Than Children

Thursday, March 19th, 2015

Dr. John Swartzberg, a clinical professor at the Berkeley School of Public Health, answered a few questions about childhood diseases, like, Why are adults more likely to get hit hard by measles?

He believes that these viruses and humans could be examples of “host-parasite interaction,” and that we have “adapted to each other,” over long periods of time. Those adaptations are dependent on us contracting diseases at a specific time of life.

This isn’t as odd as it sounds. Although we think of our bodies as fighting invading viruses, the relationship isn’t adversarial. The measles virus isn’t “trying” to kill us any more than the polio virus was trying to kill us.

The polio virus came to be known as a fearsome killer of children. That, according to Swartzberg, was because no one understood the virus’s own, very skinny, U-shaped curve. Polio, when contracted by very young children, isn’t nearly the killer we think it is. The polio virus is spread through infected fecal matter. When the public water supply consisted of rivers, lakes, wells, and pumps, infected fecal matter and drinking water mixed regularly. Infants were exposed to the virus early. When the government cleaned up drinking water — saving infants and adults from many other diseases — young children no longer came into contact with the polio virus. It was only later in childhood, when they went swimming in pools and streams, that kids contracted the virus. The parasite and the host no longer had matching adaptations. The disease that, for the most part, had been mild, became devastating.

That being said, even a disease that is “for the most part” mild can have terrible consequences, and there’s no comfort in being in the shallow part of the U, if you’re below the mortality line. In 2013, there were 145,700 deaths due to the measles. Before the measles vaccine became widely available, there were 2.6 million measles deaths per year. Some of those deaths were of children who got measles at the “right” age, when the effects of the disease were supposed to be mild. Some of those deaths were of people at the wrong age, who caught measles from children at the right age.

Comments

  1. Magus Janus says:

    It makes sense also for the hypothetical virus causing obligate male homosexuality. It has to be contracted at an early age and causes (or immune reaction to it causes) a messing up of sexual targeting part of the brain. Grown-ups of course are immune to it or don’t have said reaction.

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