MEASLES: A DANGEROUS ILLNESS, BY ROALD DAHL

ROALD DAHL on Olivia, writing in 1986:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it.

Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipecleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ I asked her. ‘I feel all sleepy,’ she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In 12 hours she was dead.

The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was 24 years ago, in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help them.

On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles.

I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is ask your doctor to administer it.

It is not yet generally accepted that measles can be a dangerous illness. Believe me, it is.

In my opinion, parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk. In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles, like smallpox, has been virtually