DISCLAIMER: I am in no way advocating for the spreading of a highly contagious and deadly disease or the abstention from safe and highly effective vaccines. But, this is No Stupid Questions, so…
Measles is known for wiping out your immune system memory and re-endangering you to pathogens you had once successfully fought off.
Allergies are when your immune system misidentifies something harmless (like pollen or peanuts) as a harmful pathogen and triggers an immune response.
So, what happens to allergies in people who get measles? Does it wipe out the immune system’s memory of the allergen? Does it expose them to develop new allergies? Do we even know whether it does anything to allergies at all, or has it never been studied? What about other auto immune diseases?
Secondly, if it does do something, is there some way that it can be utilized to help allergy sufferers? Not in the “give people a deadly contagious disease” kind of way (I’ve heard of the tapeworm thing), but is there something there that could studied and developed into a targeted drug or treatment? Or is the mechanism just too broad and dangerous.
That’s a fun question to ponder. I don’t have a good answer for you. I think it might boil down to the mast cells and whether or not measles kills them in addition to the B and T memory cells. Have you read Immune by Philipp Dettmer yet? If not, you absolutely should check it out. There’s an excellent chapter about allergies, as well as a subchapter about measles.
Edit: trying to harness this measles’ indiscriminate appetite for long-lived plasma and Memory B and T cells to only those that may be sensitive to allergens seems like a tall order, but it’s amazing what immunologists have been able to achieve.
Maybe figure out how to make a measles virus with an antigen that’s only similar to the allergen’s so it selectively attacks those problematic immune cells. That’d be neat. Sounds REALLY complex in practice.