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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your spooky 'net denizen"):
mhoye ("mhoye (temporarily spooky)") wrote:

This is Roald Dahl's 1986 plea to parents to get their children vaccinated against measles; his daughter died of it in 1962, before vaccines were widely available.

Turns out measles can just kill you outright weeks or months or sometimes years after infection, when you're supposedly over it and healthy again.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra2504516

https://web.archive.org/web/20200303050650/https://roalddahl.com/roald-dahl/timeline/1960s/november-1962

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.
Measles-associated encephalitis is a rare but serious, and potentially fatal, complication. It can occur during the first 7 days of infection (acute postinfectious measles encephalitis), 1 to 6 months after infection (measles-inclusion body encephalitis), or even years after full recovery (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis).