Despite the development of a successful live attenuated vaccine, measles remains one of the major infectious diseases with high mortality in developing countries and continuing outbreacks in other nations. A major physiopathological feature of measles infection is the concomitance of the induction of a long lasting efficient anti-viral immune response and a profound immunosuppression with impairment of humoral and cellular immune response to unrelated antigens. The analytical analysis of natural infection in human and experimental disease in monkeys allied to the discovery of many cellular proteins recruited by viral proteins has led to partly uncover many molecular and cellular mechanisms which govern the measles virus interplay with the human immune system. Indeed, this model of immune subversion by a pathogen has been thoroughly studied for many years and has led to some seminal findings dealing with the regulation of the immune system.
