Immunity Blackout: The Conundrum of 'Immune Amnesia' in Humans

Just visualise the scenario where you spend years of your life building up a defence team in your body that remembers every invading enemy it has fought, from chickenpox to the flu, from pneumonia to skin infections and many, many, more. The body then goes on to build up a robust armamentarium to fight them the next time they attempt to cause trouble.

- BY DR B. J. C. PERERA MBBS(Cey), DCH(Cey), DCH(Eng), MD(Paed), MRCP(UK), FRCP(Edin), FRCP(Lond), FRCPCH(UK), FSLCPaed, FCCP, Hony. FRCPCH(UK), Hony. FCGP(SL) Specialist Consultant Paediatrician and Honorary Senior Fellow of the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Joint Editor, Sri Lanka Journal of Child Health Section Editor, Ceylon Medical Journal

This is what usually happens with our natural defence systems of the human body. The memory of the attackers is the thing that leads to war being declared on them subsequently.

Now, imagine a setting where disaster strikes in the form of some intruder who breaks in and erases those memories, leaving your body exposed and unprotected. We now know for sure that this is not a scene from a sci-ence fiction movie. It is a real thing that takes place in the human body, called Immune Amnesia; the word amnesia being a glorified term for forgetting something. It is a situation where the body "disremembers" how to fight off diseases it once defeated. This kind of immune memory loss leaves the body wide open to catch-ing infections that one was previously protected against. It is not merely about getting sick again. It is about becoming vulnerable to a whole list of diseases, some of them serious, or even deadly.