A pediatrician named Clemens von Perké ended up killing himself at age 54 years old.

In fact, him and his wife both committed suicide with cyanide.

Before he died, he did a lot of interesting work and observations in immunology.

And one of the things that he observed back in 1909 was that when patients were recovering

from measles, not only did they have decreased responses to tuberculin that was injected

for skin testing, he also observed that these patients recovering from measles had flares, clinical flares, of tuberculosis.

Let's jump ahead for a minute to modern times, and I want to look at a BMJ article,

British Medical Journal titled Late Mortality After Sepsis, and this was published in 2016.

And the results of this observational cohort study showed that sepsis was associated with a 22%

absolute increase in late mortality in those adults that survived hospitalization.

And if you didn't read this study, it'd be easy to come up with things in your own head as to why that may be.

So you may be like, well, maybe this can be partly explained by age.

Nope, that wasn't a factor.

Maybe it's socioeconomic demographics of these people that get into sepsis issues.

And nope, that wasn't the issue. Or maybe it was just pre-existing

conditions or health status before sepsis occurred. And no, that was not a factor either.

There may be several factors at play, but maybe at the very top of the list or higher on the list

at a minimum, is that there is some sort of

suppressed immune response that is a result of epigenetic scarring of immune cells.

So I started off talking about how measles can induce an immunosuppression. And this was not just seen with tuberculosis

as was well observed in the early 1900s, but it also increases the risk of second bacterial

otitis media infections, tracheitis, even just pneumonia. And by no means is this limited to measles inducing immunosuppression

...