Roald Dahl and his Olivia

We’ve all grown up on Roald Dahl’s beautiful stories of extraordinary children and the magical things that happen to them. What we might be less familiar with is the story of his own daughter, Olivia, who died from the measles in 1962, before there was a measles vaccine. She was seven years old and an otherwise happy, healthy child. Olivia’s death left him with guilt that there wasn’t more that he could do to protect her, and as medicine developed and vaccines became available, Dahl became an advocate for these life-saving protective measures. In 1988 this essay was published, and I’ve also included the full text below.

It’s 2017 and after decades of research and discovery, eradicating some illnesses and keeping others at bay, we find ourselves at a point where more and more people are questioning their value, suggesting that vaccines are more dangerous than the illnesses, that people are meant to get sick and we’re built to recover. Some even continue to suggest that vaccines cause autism, despite the one study presenting this claim being not only debunked, but proven fraudulent. Yesterday the President-Elect of the United States announced that he is asking someone who is adamantly against vaccines to lead a study on vaccine safety. This same President-Elect is on the record as believing that vaccines cause autism.

Meanwhile, as this rhetoric spreads, the vaccination rates drop and illnesses gain new footholds in the population. Children are getting seriously ill and even dying from vaccine-preventable illnesses.

Most people get sick and get better. Some people don’t. Some people die because they’ve been exposed to illnesses that people have dedicated their lives to protecting us from.

So how do we approach this? How do we make choices with so many competing opinions? With the overwhelming amount of information out there, it is our responsibility now more than ever to make sure that we’re following what’s real and dismissing what is not. Question your sources. Look to the science and the results. Look to the history and the evidence that over and over, a vaccinated population has been a healthier population.

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Our Prime Minister said this last month, and while it wasn’t about vaccines, it was about science. And we like science, and that’s where vaccines come from. People say a lot of things on the internet. There are a lot of ideas and feelings about vaccines, and they can make you pause and question your choices, but the evidence is clear. A vaccinated population is always healthier than an unvaccinated population. Working together we’re keeping us all safer from illnesses that used to kill and permanently affect mass numbers of people. It takes all of us.

“We need to be basing our decisions and policies on facts, on evidence and on science.” – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, December 2016

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Roald Dahl, in his own words.

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 twelve 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 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. 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 to 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 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. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die.

LET THAT SINK IN.

Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles.

So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunised?

They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation.

So what on earth are you worrying about? It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised.

The ideal time to have it done is at 13 months, but it is never too late. All school-children who have not yet had a measles immunisation should beg their parents to arrange for them to have one as soon as possible.

Incidentally, I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the first was ‘James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.