Measles: The forgotten killer

As a medical student, the place I dreaded most was the ward at the children’s hospital where they kept the chronic ventilator patients. Unlike the other floors, where there was shouting and laughter and tears, and all the commotion and turbulence of youth, here it was dark and lifeless and eerie, with no sound except the hum of the ventilators, and the rattle of air being forced through plastic tubes. It was a place of failure and defeat, the desolate aftermath of some vast and tragic battle. An unexpected aftermath of measles My patient was a teenager who had been in a coma for years. His limbs had stubbornly twisted up in the contortions that a damaged brain inflicts on a body, despite operations to keep them straight. The expectations for my care were low. I was to try to keep his lungs from plugging up with sputum, to prevent him from getting more bedsores, to watch his feeding tube for clogs, and to make sure that his eyes were not drying out and getting ulcers. He once had been a bright and healthy boy with measles, who apparently had made an uneventful recovery. But a few years later, he began to struggle in school. He became clumsy, dropped things, and fell for no reason. To the terror of his parents, he started to have seizures. A brain biopsy showed the culprit: a mutated measles virus that causes a progressive, incurable form of dementia known as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE). And now he would never again play baseball, or hear birds sing, or feel th...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Children's Health Infectious diseases Men's Health Vaccines Women's Health Source Type: blogs