ALEX PATTERSON, 11 MONTHS

ALEX PATTERSON was such a robust, healthy little boy that his mum, Sam, still struggles with the knowledge that he succumbed so very quickly to the illness that took his life.

The 11-month-old had been playing happily with big brother Callum, now four, in the park on a Sunday morning in April last year — but within hours he was being taken by ambulance from their home in Girton, near Cambridge, to Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

Sam, 34, a medical engineer who is expecting another son in April, recalls vividly how her blue-eyed little boy fell sick after his lunch.

‘I remember one moment where he shook all over,’ she says. A gut feeling that something was wrong made her call an out-of-hours GP. She was relieved to be reassured that Alex’s symptoms sounded like a tummy bug.

At 10pm, dad James, 34, an electronics engineer, spotted a tiny rash on Alex’s neck.

‘We called an ambulance and they got us to Addenbrooke’s very quickly. They were fantastic, but he died at 8pm the next day. His symptoms had started just 30 hours earlier. It was a terrible, terrible shock.’

The youngster’s death came just days after it was announced that the vaccine would finally be made available to infants.

Sam says: ‘We got Callum, our eldest, vaccinated within a few weeks of losing Alex.’