Starving a baby

OHHHHHHHHHHHHH aruna....Okay. I had a child in ICU once that was fed very diluted formula because the parents had no money (breastfeeding????) anyway. The baby clinically had very abnormal lab values, liver and kidney failure, etc. The baby was jaundiced from the liver failure, pale, thin, poor muscle tone, very weak cry, no tears, no wet diapers (kidney failure) you could see the ribs. The build up of toxins from the kidney failure caused labored breathing or "retraction" so that when the baby breathed the skin on the chest appeared to be sucking in and you could see ribs, both nostrils flared when breathing. This baby had not yet progressed to heart failure, but that would have been next which would have caused "motteling" of the skin or a patchy appearance to the extremities. The babies face might develop a bloated look from heart failure. I can give more details if you need them, pm me.

PS MY baby lived though it is thought he would have permanent brain damage.

Some DHS child protection cases are made public -- I wonder if you searched through newspaper archives or other news periodicals you might find something? Detective work is an exciting part of writing for me . . . I love the research . . . anyway, that's just a suggestion.

I’ve cared for more than a few children such as you describe. Scfirenice well describes what can happen. I would focus on several aspects. Severe malnutrition affects every organ in an infant’s body. Any standard pediatric textbook would give you the descriptive details. The brain damage is usually lasting, the other stuff can resolve. The infants I have had in the PICU who have been fed diluted cow’s milk had two main life-threatening problems: severe anemia (with about 80% of their normal red blood cells gone), and profound derangements in the blood chemistries, mainly sodium. These things caused heart failure and seizures. A key point is that correcting these abnormalities, the re-feeding period, can be extremely dangerous also. Both the anemia and the sodium abnormalities need to be corrected very slowly and carefully.

Again, any standard pediatric text would give you many details that would help. In the USA, the Nelson, Rudolph, or Oski texts are all good ones. I don’t know what the UK ones would be, but any medical library would have them, I expect.

Hmmm...as a Peace Corps volunteer, I worked in an orphanage that was located in a hospital. For reasons I won't go into, many of the orphans were sickly and constantly threw up their food. They were fed powdered milk mixed with boiling water. Sometimes it wasn't made correctly. It only takes a short time for a baby that young to get sick and die (or be starved). I would leave work on Friday and when I returned on Monday, count the babies to see if anyone was missing.

I remember trying not to get attached to any baby under 6 months, because the odds of survival weren't good.

I remember one baby (and I took a picture 'cause I was so angry-so if I can figure out how to hook up my scanner and you really want to see it...)

Anyway, she became very thin and you could see her skin stretched over her skeleton. She had a weak cry and didn't move very much. Her tiny fingers looked like sticks. I'm amazed that I can still picture this after almost twenty years.

The good news is that she survived. I don't know if she had any issues after that, because she was adopted. I do remember that the nun who worked with me lied about her age. She told the adoptive parents that the baby was four months old, when she was six months.

It's hard to remember this...but if you need any more information that I can provide, let me know.

If the milk/food is contaminated, the baby could also get severe diarrhea and die of dehydration. Infants get dehydrated incredibly quickly, and if not treated promptly, they have irreversible kidney failure.