In the context of the US measles epidemic, it might not be in the best possible taste to report that Roald Dahl went viral over the weekend. But that’s what happened when commentators picked up on a cautionary letter he wrote following the death of his seven-year-old daughter from the disease. Two of Dahl’s best-loved novels, James and the Giant Peach and The BFG, are dedicated to Olivia, who died in 1962 – but it was a heart-breaking plea the author wrote a quarter of a century later that caught the imagination.
“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 pipe-cleaners, 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 twelve hours she was dead,” he wrote.
“The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles.”
Dahl’s widow, the actress Patricia Neal, told a newspaper after his death that he was so traumatised by the loss that he could never speak about it. “Over the years, I found that talking about Olivia helped immeasurably. Roald couldn’t say a word. It was locked inside him.”
He pulled himself together to give his testimony for a leaflet published by Sandwell Health Authority (now Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust) around the time that the controversial measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) was to be introduced to the UK in 1988. It has since been taken up by medical campaign groups including the Encephalitis Society and the Oxford Vaccine Project.
“In my opinion parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk,” continued Dahl. “In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles, like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out. Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year.”
According to Sky News, the US outbreak, which has now caused 95 cases in nine states, is believed to have been spread by an unvaccinated woman at Disneyland in California. With an irony that would not have been lost on the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with its fatally spoiled brats Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt, doctors in Orange County warned last week that richer families were less likely to immunise their children.
Sky reported that the US experienced a record number of measles cases last year, with 644 infections from 27 states, despite the disease being largely eliminated in 2000. In the UK, measles has also been on the rise.
