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Hello and welcome to more or less.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life.

And I'm Tim Harford. On the program today we're doing some statistical time travel.

We head back to the 1990s and the dawn of the crime drop. Back to 2016 and those wonderful arguments

before the Brexit referendum about the economic cost of leaving the EU. Turns out we're still having them.

And back to last week, the final episode of The Traitors.

But first, a the traitors. At first a letter written decades ago by the children's author Roll Dahl has been circulating recently on social media.

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 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 it. I feel all sleepy she said in an hour she was unconscious in 12 hours she was dead

sadly the new year has seen the reappearance of an old enemy. Measles.

It's a disease which in countries such as the UK hospitalises about one in five unvaccinated people who get it,

and in rare cases it can be fatal.

So it was alarming to hear in mid-January that a rapid outbreak in the West Midlands had seen

over 200 confirmed cases since October, with 100 more probable cases.

The majority of these cases have been in children under 10 and most

of them have come in Birmingham. But in the BBC coverage of this story there was a

surprising figure.

...