To Lorraine Guerrier, a mother of three, the letter from her children’s school in southeast London seemed innocuous. There were two cases of measles among the pupils: nothing to worry about, she thought.

Lorraine, more used to notes warning there had been another outbreak of nits, had never encountered measles. What was there to fear? It was just another childhood bug.

But in the summer of last year her nine-year-old son Joe became unwell and gradually deteriorated. Doctors were baffled by the strange symptoms and were unsure what was wrong. By the time Joe was admitted to Guy’s hospital he was being slowly paralysed. Lorraine wept at his bedside as he hallucinated and lost consciousness.

“It’s the worst feeling in the world to stand at the hospital bed of your child and watch him slip into a coma without even knowing what’s wrong,” said Lorraine, 40, from Bermondsey. “It was terrifying.”

Two weeks after Joe was admitted, his friend Matthew Costen, 13, also arrived at the hospital. Matthew had collapsed outside his bedroom early one Tuesday morning. Within 48 hours he was unable to walk, by Friday he could barely move his hands and by Saturday he was going blind.

A rapid series of tests on blood and other samples from both children came back negative. Both boys deteriorated and were admitted into intensive care.

The doctors were concerned that the boys’ brains were swelling dangerously, a condition known as encephalitis. They suspected a viral infection, but could not identify it.

Dr Eithne MacMahon, consultant virologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals, said: “This was something I’d never seen before. We had to think much harder about what it could be and decided to test for measles, even though measles-associated encephalitis hasn’t been seen in the UK for many years.”

The tests came back positive. Matthew and Joe were fighting for their lives against an affliction that British doctors thought had been consigned to the history books.

HOW had a potentially lethal disease resurfaced with such a vengeance? For more than four decades a concerted effort to vaccinate children had driven measles almost off the map. A few cases persisted each year, but they numbered barely 100.

Then in February 1998 Dr Andrew Wakefield, a researcher at the Royal Free hospital in London, ignited a worldwide scare over the safety of the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Through a study published in medical journal The Lancet, the vaccine was linked to a bowel disorder and a severe form of regressive behaviour, generally known as autism.

As The Sunday Times revealed last month, that Wakefield’s research paper was seriously flawed. A four-month investigation by this newspaper established that Wakefield’s conclusions in no way justified the scare. Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, has since described it as “fatally flawed” and formally withdrawn the section of the paper making a link between MMR and autism.

But in February 1998 the damage had been done. On the back of the Wakefield scare, many parents decided not to give their children the MMR triple jab. For more than six years there has been widespread publicity focusing on tenuous links between MMR and autism; yet at the same time the long proven dangers of measles have received scant coverage.

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