(DU Cross- Post) - How Measles Hacks the Body—and Harms Its Victims for Years
The 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.
It’s 2019, and all over the world measles is once again splotching across headlines. An ongoing outbreak in the Philippines has so far infected 4,300. In Ukraine more than 15,000 people have caught the disease since December, the country’s largest epidemic since the invention of vaccines. Madagascar is having its own worst outbreak in decades, with more than 50,000 cases since October, including 300 deaths.
The numbers in the US are smaller, for now, due to high vaccination rates nationwide. But in isolated pockets of the country where anti-vaxx sentiment is high, the disease has come surging back. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is currently tracking just over 100 cases across five outbreaks in Washington, New York, and Texas.
Among airborne respiratory pathogens, measles is an elite virus—the most contagious disease in the world. If you give this virus a lung, it’ll take a town. A cough from an infected person on a subway car would spread the disease to 90 out of 100 unprotected people. The virus stays alive, airborne outside the body of its human host, for up to two hours. For years scientists puzzled over how exactly measles achieves its contagion-in-chief status. But advances in microscopy and genetics have finally begun to illuminate what makes the virus so damn catchy...
https://www.democraticunderground.com/114236771
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(DU Cross Post): Measles cases reported in New Jersey, Kentucky amid ongoing outbreak in Texas, Source: abc news, Feb. 28, 2025.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143406709
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