Vaccine Safety Questioned, But Parents Told Vaccine Can Save Your Kids From Measles

Amid the current measles outbreak in the United States, which has now sickened more than 100 people in 14 states, parents are once again being encouraged to protect their children through vaccination.

In this light, CBS News recalled on Monday a public appeal made by "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" author Roald Dahl for parents to let their children receive vaccine shots.

The late author also wrote "James and the Giant Peach," "Matilda" and many other books well-loved by children and adults alike around the world.

In his letter written two years before he died in 1990, Dahl recalled how the life of his seven-year-old daughter Olivia was claimed by complications of measles, a disease that killed 400 to 500 people in the U.S. yearly more than half a century ago.

His daughter with wife Patricia Neal died in 1962 due to measles. In 1963, a vaccine that could have prevented it came out.

In a heartfelt letter addressed to parents as featured in a website dedicated to him, Dahl wrote: "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 colored 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 immunized 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 immunized are putting the lives of those children at risk. In America, where measles immunization 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 immunized, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year."

In the current measles outbreak, which begun spreading at Disneyland in December, most of the patients have not been vaccinated, according to authorities.

A vaccination campaign virtually eliminated measles in the U.S. in 2000. An increasing number of parents later chose not to have their children vaccinated.

Across the country, the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination rate has reached 90 percent. However, in some communities a majority of families still refuse to have their children vaccinated.