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Mother claimed £130,000 in benefits faked son’s illness

A 35-year-old British mother claimed £130,000 in benefits by faking her son’s illness, making him appear to be, “one of the sickest children in Britain”, even more disturbing was that she was giving him false medication and forcing him to have surgery.

Police said his bedroom was like ‘a scene out of the TV show Casualty’ with a specialist bed, medical equipment and boxes of liquid food.

The woman had “manipulated highly regarded medical professionals” to con the public, government agencies and children’s charity purses said Detective Constable Mark Uren said, who led the investigation.

He said the mother claimed £20,000 a year in disability living allowance for over half a decade by forcing her young son to be fed through a tube.

Detective Constable Mark Uren continued revealing the motives of the con by saying: “His mother used the fabricated illnesses to take free holidays paid for by charities and was introduced to celebrities. She claimed the highest rate of disability living allowance.

“We discovered that he was, in fact, suffering from none of the symptoms of illnesses that she claimed. She was very cunning and aggressive with medical professionals.”

She told doctors the boy had diabetes and spiked his urine samples with glucose to fool tests. And she conned paediatricians into believing he needed a wheelchair, claiming he had cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, a throat disorder called dysphagia and countless food allergies. She even faked blood samples.

Since the boy was an infant she maintained to doctors, friends and family, even his father, that he was unable to eat or swallow food. She took her son to school in a wheelchair fitted with oxygen bottles and maintained that he had to be fed through a tube into his stomach. Doctors, who were never able to identify the mystery illness, eventually operated and fitted him with a permanent feeding tube.

Dozens of children’s charities also gave her freebies including a new car, tickets to see the X Factor and a cruise in Tenerife. The boy, who was also convinced he was ill, was also introduced to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, avoided detection by missing key hospital appointments, on one occasion claiming she couldn’t attend a diabetic appointment because she had been raped. The false rape claim was reported to police, who were on the verge of making an arrest, after the woman caused injuries to herself to substantiate her claims of a violent attack.

She was eventually found out when a paediatrician raised the alarm after reviewing her son’s medical files and became suspicious that his health problems had gone on for so long without a clear diagnosis.

Yesterday at Exeter Crown Court she admitted perverting the course of justice and child cruelty. She will be sentenced in the New Year.

The court heard she has controlled access to her son, who did not suffer life-threatening abuse but had been ‘mentally traumatised’ by his ordeal.

Judge Stephen Wildblood QC indicated the mother will face a jail term of no more than three years and three months.

         

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Newborn Babies In England To Be Offered Life-Saving Blood Test

Newborn babies in England are now being offered a potentially life-saving blood test.

Medium Chain Acyl CoA Dehydrogenase Deficiency (MCADD) is a rare metabolic condition, which if undiagnosed, can make the child seriously ill.

The condition reduces the body’s ability to break down fat to produce energy. Often the disorder is first diagnosed if someone is ill or is extremely hungry. If untreated, they may become seriously ill due to their organs not working. In some cases, they could die if not provided with glucose.

The screening program will test babies when they are approximately five days old. MCADD affects one in every 10,000 babies born. If undiagnosed, one in 20 will die and others may suffer from brain damage.

Blood will be taken from a baby’s heel by a midwife, which is routinely carried out to test for other conditions such as cystic fibrosis.

Professor Carol Dezateux, of the Medical Research Council Centre of Epidemiology for Children’s Health, who led the study said “This can allow children to have some very simple treatment to prevent them getting ill.”

         

Premature babies on antibiotics are at risk of becoming deaf

Genetic researchers at the Institute of Child Health in London revealed a report claiming that antibiotics used to treat infections in premature babies put them at a high risk of turning deaf.

The prime antibiotic in focus is aminoglycosides. Aminoglycosides, categorised as “broad spectrum” drugs, are powerful antibiotics used to treat infections in premature babies. These antiobiotics are widely used because they are effective and cheap.

Published in the ‘New England Journal of Medicine’, the study warns that children with an inherited sensitivity to very potent antibiotics might leave them with a lifelong and irreversible hearing disability. This sensitivity can be blamed on genetic mutations found in some individuals.

Infections in children with cancer and other chronic medical conditions including tuberculosis, septicemia, complicated urinary tract infections and cystic fibrosis are usually treated with these sets of antibiotics, which are used for adults as well.

This category of extremely powerful antibiotics is known to cause permanent damage to the ear (otoxicity) and hearing ability.

Aminoglycosides cannot be prescribed by a GP and is used widely in premature baby units in hospitals. It is administered with the help of injection in patients. Researchers agree that if some families are carrying this mutation, they may experience hearing loss even when they are not exposed to aminoglycosides.

The researchers studied blood samples of more than 9,000 children. They observed that one in every 500 children had a genetic mutation called m.1555A-G mutation, which had made them more susceptible to the aminoglycosides causing deafness.

Research Lead Maria Bitner-Glindzicz, a consultant geneticist said, “All (the affected children) are permanently deaf. It is possible there are more children with a lesser degree of hearing loss who have not come to the notice of doctors. Adults can also be affected. If you have this mutation and get this class of antibiotics, they have this rapid and extreme effect.”

Bitner-Glindzicz and her colleagues explained that children must be screened beforehand to detect the mutation before injecting aminoglycosides. However, they agree that in emergency cases patient might have to be given antibiotics immediately.

“Waiting for a gene test may sometimes not be clinically right, particularly on neonatal units. Universal pre-natal testing of mothers should be considered for this reason,” said Bitner-Glindzicz.

“It was known a side effect was hearing loss, but if doctors found a case of hearing loss in a premature baby, they tended to ascribe it to prematurity or that the dose of antibiotics was too high,” she quoted. “Now we have established it is to do with genetic susceptibility, and it affects one in 500 babies.”

According to Bitner-Glindzicz, screening pregnant women for this mutation is very essential to protect children from such risks and these tests must be made mandatory. Almost 20,000 babies are treated with aminoglycosides every year.