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I'm Jo Walton and this is Sarah my daughter.
Sarah was born in 1979
and she was a very wanted, healthy, happy baby
who went through all of her normal milestones
usually a little earlier than she should have done.
At the age of eleven months
she contracted measles.
She wasn't particularly poorly and she recovered very rapidly.
and went on to have a very normal rest of her childhood.
Her teenage years were marked by loads of successes.
She did really well at GCSE level, she did really well at A level
and then she went off to university
and having finished with a 2:1
she decided that she would pop herself off to King's College to study midwifery.
Round about the beginning of 2004
she told me that she wasn't feeling very well
and by the February of 2004 she was actually signed off her course.
She was getting quite upset
about the fact that she knew she was ill
and she didn't know what was wrong with her, or what was going to happen.
The progression of her illness went in stages.
You'd think that she was ok and she was starting to recover a little bit
and then there would be something else that would drop off.
We eventually got a diagnosis at the beginning of September.
The consultant came out to see us, so we knew that it wasn't good news.
And at that point we were told
that she had subacute sclerosing panencephalitis
and that this illness had been caused by the measles virus
the measles infection that she'd had when she was 11 months old
and it had taken over 24 years to actually develop
into something far more deadly, far more devastating
than the measles virus could ever be.
SSPE is a very rare disorder, it's a very rare complication of the measles virus
but it is devastating. Right back at the beginning when Sarah was a baby
Sarah had had most of her normal vaccinations
but in terms of the measles vaccine
I had more or less made the decision that we weren't going to go for it
because of the allergy side of things, because it was an egg-based vaccine.
But then nobody ever mentioned SSPE to me.
That wasn't something that I was able to put into the mix
in terms of the decisions that I was making.
And I've got to say that now, knowing what SSPE can do
and the devastation that it causes to a life that was full of so much promise
and the devastation that it has wreaked on other lives
that were so full of promise
if it was a choice between taking a risk
against the possible allergy or allergic reactions to the vaccine
I think I'd go with those, in fact I know I'd go with those
rather than the risk of a child of mine contracting SSPE.