Below is an excerpt Jellyfish age retrograde: nature’s secret to longevity By Niklas Bremboau. January 17, 2023, Amazon, Barnes & NobleWhen Bookshop.org.
Fortunately, when the United States began vaccinating against the measles virus in the 1960s, children were immune to measles. But that’s not all. Suddenly, the risk of American children dying from all kinds of other infectious diseases also dropped sharply. But how can vaccines protect against infections they don’t target?
Like all other microbes that infect us, the measles virus is not a big fan of our immune system. and immediately start working. Viruses, like the measles virus, fight back by hiding, trying to trick the immune system, and sometimes fighting back. It’s been going on all your life. It’s happening in you right now.
Pathogens have evolved a variety of weapons to target the immune system, but the measles virus has found one particularly effective. It can cause what is thought to be immune amnesia. Normally, certain cells in the immune system retain memories of previous adversaries. This is wise as it reduces the time it takes your immune system to react if you encounter the same enemy again. Plan already exists. This immune “memory” is why vaccines can prevent the onset of disease, and why diseases like chickenpox only occur once in a lifetime.
G/O Media can earn commissions
Up to $100 credit
Samsung Reserve
Reserve the next gen Samsung device
All you need to do is sign up with your email and boom: credit for your preorder on a new Samsung device.
When the measles virus causes ‘memory loss’ in our immune system, though, all this valuable information is lost. This benefits the measles virus itself, but it’s also a boon for all sorts of other bacteria and viruses. Suddenly, these pathogens have a much easier time infecting us. Therefore, infection with the measles virus predisposes you to all sorts of other infections, too. In fact, it is estimated that the measles virus used to contribute to half of childhood deaths from other infections.
Such one-two punches are quite common in the world of infections. A straight right from an initial infection and then a left hook from a second one that exploits the chaos to its own benefit. On the one hand, this principle illustrates why vaccines were (and still are) the uncrowned king of medical science. But it is also bad news, because there are still plenty of dangerous microbes that we don’t have vaccines against yet.
A particularly good example is HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. HIV attacks certain cells of the immune system called T-cells. You can think of T-cells as the generals of the immune system, because they are responsible for orchestrating your immune responses. When HIV attacks T-cells, they eventually succumb to the virus. This means the immune system becomes weaker and weaker, and eventually it cannot keep up with all sorts of other microbes. As a result, HIV-infected people become vulnerable to otherwise harmless infections. Microbes, which normally live in or on us in peaceful coexistence, sense an opportunity and begin to grow out of control. The relatively harmless fungus Candida albicans – which lives on over half of us – can turn into a serious infection. Herpes virus 8 can go from being relatively harmless to causing a form of cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Even the flu can become deadly.
The infectious burden of HIV is taxing on the body, and even though we now have anti-HIV drugs that help patients live much longer than previously, they still die earlier than non-infected people. They also have an increased risk of everything from cancer to cardiovascular diseases. And in fact, it turns out that HIV infection in itself increases the rate of biological ageing. Patients with HIV are five to seven years older biologically than their actual age as measured by the epigenetic clock.
As a whole, there are countless viruses that target humans, including ones we don’t know about yet. It’s not hard to imagine that some of these contribute to ageing or disease; nor is it difficult to envision that diseases, for which we haven’t yet identified the cause, could turn out to have bacterial or viral involvement. Okay, it might not be particularly wise to become a paranoid hypochondriac either, but it’s certainly worthwhile using a little common sense and of course, getting vaccinated.
Nicklas Brendborg is a PhD student of molecular biology at the University of Copenhagen. In 2015, Brendborg published his first book, Top Student. He also co-authored Lars Tvede’s bestseller Supertrends.
