Roald Dahl Wrote This Painful Plea For Vaccinations After His Own Daughter Died Of Measles

Author Roald Dahl penned a heartbreaking letter in 1988, urging parents to vaccinate their kids, in which he shared the story of his heartbreak over his own daughter's death from measles. According to the author's website, Olivia "Twenty" Dahl, the oldest daughter of Roald and his wife, Patricia, died in November 1962. A letter written by Dahl about her death was featured in a pamphlet from The Sandwell Health Authority in 1988. Read the full text of the letter below, via HuffPost UK: Measles: A Dangerous Illness 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 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 from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to h...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news