Karunakaran and Rajeswari are heading back home. After spending 82 days at Government Kilpauk Medical College Hospital (KMC), their son, the ‘burning baby’, was discharged on Thursday morning.
Doctors found no medical cause to support his parents’ claim that he had spontaneously burst into flames and the hospital has informed child welfare officials as well as the police to ask local authorities in the parents’ village to periodically monitor the three-month-old.
The second son of the couple from T. Parangini in Villupuram district, Jayaramachandran, as the baby has been named, was brought to the KMC on January 19 with five per cent burns on his feet. His mother claimed he had ‘caught fire’ at his home on January 15, just a few days after he was born. She told doctors she had stepped out of the house for a few minutes and had heard her baby screaming. She had come in to find his feet on fire.
At a press meet on Thursday, doctors at the KMC said they had performed 40 different medical tests on the baby, but nothing unusual was found. All his parameters were normal and there were no incidents of burning while he was at the hospital. “Since he was in the air-conditioned neonatal intensive care unit, we even kept him at normal temperatures to see if that would trigger an incident, but nothing happened,” said dean Narayana Babu.
A genetic test was also performed on the parents, and on their first son Rahul, who too, had been brought to the hospital in 2013 for the same condition. However, this too yielded no results, said Dr. Babu. The baby weighed 2.1 kg when he came in and now weighs 5.3 kg, the doctors said.
“The reason we kept the baby here for this long was that the parents had told us that Rahul had ‘caught fire’ four times in the first 73 days after his birth. We wanted to make sure nothing like that would happen this time,” he said.
Head of the psychiatry department S. Rajarathinam said the parents had undergone psychiatric counselling but had shown no signs of major mental illnesses. However, since there seemed to be no medical cause behind the burning, there could be psychological reasons behind the incidents, he said.
While doctors at the KMC did not say what the reason behind the burns could be, suspicions of abuse persist, as with the older son.
