Another good reason to vaccinate for measles

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We all know the benefits of measles vaccination, right? Nearly no chance of measles, for one. You also heavily reduce the side effects of measles infection if you're vaccinated. That means that children are at much lower risk of having permanent hearing loss, intellectual disability, and that particularly bad one, death.

Turns out there's another surprising side effect to vaccination. What they found when they began vaccinating, including in the 1960s US, is that children suddenly stopped dying from all infectious diseases including pneumonia and diarrhea. The rates of death dropped by about 50% and in countries where there's a lot of the diseases the rates dropped by up to 80%. This happens because when kids get measles, it predisposes them to the other infectious diseases. It does this by erasing immune protection to other diseases and the children's immune system has to start over, building immune protection to diseases it has already been exposed to.

By vaccinating, the kids are not going to have their immune systems wiped and are therefore going to have the lowered rates of death from the diseases they get due to lowered immune systems.
 
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