Roald Dahl becomes sage of US measles outbreak

Open letter written by author of Matilda and BFG after death of his seven-year-old daughter urged parents to immunise their children

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.”

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