subacute sclerosing panencephalitis

Okay, one more from John.

John writes, "Your epitope 1359 answered a lot of my questions about why SSPE is so rare, takes so long to manifest, and yet can be correlated with prior measles infection.

Am I correct in thinking that these hyperfusogenic variants with a Phe X substitution can, in a way, be thought of as somatic mutations? They don't arise or at least don't gain any advantage until after the initial infection.

I guess all of us who acquired our measles immunity the old-fashioned way can be happy that such mutants aren't a part of the wild population, but why is that? Being hyperfusogenic is somehow incompatible with natural infectivity? Best regards from an overcast Greater Braddock at 17 C, where the awful humidity of late seems to have largely grounded out." So John, this is how I look at it, and this is what I asked Roberto, and he agreed.

We're up to 3,568 measles cases, and you can see where the big, um, where the big epicenters are.

Um, and, and maybe this is a time for us to, uh, sort of recommend people listen to the latest deep dive, um, ASV TWIV, uh, where SSPE is discussed.

Um, and what's really tragic there is, so this is a, this is an, an incurable, um, manifestation, a delayed manifestation of measles infection.

And, you know, you look at, you know, say, "Okay, so over 3,000 people have been infected." Um, and for, for every 600, um, kids who get infected prior than one, um, we're gonna see a case of SSPE, where five to 10 years after the fact, so five to 10 years from now, this process has already been set in motion, these children over a year will basically progress from a normal healthy child to a vegetative state, where the only way to keep them alive is to have them, um, non-verbal with a feeding tube on a ventilator.

And that's, that's happening.

We, we are letting that happen.

Most of the kids who are hospitalized and have severe complications will die of something like pneumonia or encephalitis.

There's also a really horrible complication that can happen years after a measles infection called SSPE, where a kid will kind of out of nowhere get a horrific encephalitis that is 100% fatal.

And so it's, but honestly, Chelsea, then I think back at, you know, what we heard from Robert Malone at the ACIP meeting last year of 250 deaths from flu being a modest number.

That's what I thought he

So now on to our guests.

Today, we're gonna talk about a disease, a post, uh, measles disease called SSPE.

So Roberto, uh, what...

So subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, what, what is this?

The name spells out subacute.

Okay.

So what, what exactly is SSPE?

Well, it's a horrible disease.

It's what we call acute disseminated, uh, encephalomyelitis.

And then there's a third complication called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, so SSPE, which is a, uh, much later complication.

It could be, like, a decade after your measles infection, but which, which can also slowly destroy the brain.

So there are a number of different, uh, really terrible neurologic complications that can result from this as well.

There's also a syndrome associated with these infections that is similar to something that's seen in measles in humans.

So often when kids get infected with measles at a very young age, they might recover, but then years later they get encephalitis and that's called for measles SSPE or subacute sclerosing panencephalitis and that's almost uniformly deadly.

And you see something similar in dogs as well that's called old dog encephalitis.

So that's something that dogs can get that survived canine distemper virus infection.