When Measles is Allowed to Run Its Usual Course, Kids Can Die
Do you know what can happen when measles is allowed to run its usual course?
Anti-vaccine influencers sure don’t seem to know.
If they did, they wouldn’t post reminders about the ‘usual course’ of measles…
They wouldn’t want you to know that the usual course of ‘mild’ measles symptoms can include a week of high fever, irritability, poor appetite, and a cough, would they?
To them, the usual course of measles is the Brady Bunch measles episode, not the more realistic Lassie Crisis measles episode!
When Measles is Allowed to Run Its Usual Course, Kids Can Die
And they surely don’t want you to know that kids can die in the usual course of measles!
Tragically, that’s what happened to the seven-year-old daughter of Roald Dahl, who got sick with measles just around the time that Price Charles had measles. Olivia Dahl wasn’t as lucky as Prince Charles though - she died.
In 1986, Dahl wrote that “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.
Tragically, many parents have forgotten his message.
“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 way 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 could do anything… In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours, she was dead.”
Death of Olivia
Instead, they are listening to anti-vaccine influencers who would have them believe that measles is a mild disease.
Anti-vaccine influencers who never mention that measles encephalitis can be a part of the usual course of measles…
Or that pneumonia, another life-threatening complication, can be a part of the usual course of measles.
Life-threatening complications that we are seeing more often now that cases of measles are rising in more developed countries.
Measles deaths that we can add to the total counts from developing countries that public health experts have long been battling, working to control, with the goal to hopefully one day eradicate measles.
Work that has been side-lined by a loss of funding from Trump and Secretary RFK Jr that will lead to more measles and more deaths.
References
Death of Olivia https://web.archive.org/web/20140407115858/http://www.roalddahl.com/roald-dahl/timeline/1960s/november-1962
“Dealing with Olivia’s Death” https://www.roalddahlfans.com/about-dahl/articles-interviews/dealing-with-olivias-death/
BTW: New study from Denmark confirms Aluminum in childhood vaccines is NOT associated with autistic spectrum disorders (or allergies or any other stuff)
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997
Something for RFK to consider (and cast aside, no doubt).
“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 way 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 could do anything… In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours, she was dead.”
To an anti-vaccination activist this means Olivia Dahl did NOT die of measles but of encephalitis, just like those two young girls in Texas did not die of measles but of pneumonia