Rahul a three month old kid, who has been catching fire repeatedly because of a rare of the rarest medical conditions known as Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC), is finally stable, said the doctors on Saturday.
Noted as the first case of that kind reported in southern India, the baby boy was admitted to Chennai’s Kilpauk Medical College Hospital (KMCH). At that time he was brought with 10% burn injuries from Vilupuram district in Tamil Nadu on Thursday.
Soon he had been referred to the Chennai hospital by the collector of the Villupuram. Paediatricians are pretty vigilant and are treating the baby for his burn injuries as well as scars, said the sources of KMCH.
Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) is a very rare medical condition. It has only 200 cases reported in a span of past 300 years, Rahul being one of them. “In SHC, burns are caused spontaneously due to gases and fluids emitted by the body,” said the doctors.
Rajeswari, Rahul’s mother told that the three-month-old has already gone through four such fire episodes. The first one happened when he was just nine days old. Rajeswari further told that the villagers at first assumed that she was trying to harm her own baby. She added that her husband Karna is an agricultural labourer.
“The baby is fine and his condition is improving,” Dr Narayana Babu, one of doctors attending to Rahul said. All the tests relating to this condition are being done here only. “We will get the results of the tests in a day or two,” said karna.
All the doctors attending on him at the hospital are also researching on all the data available, which is unfortunately too less as this is a rare condition, he added. In elderly persons, he said, excessive consumption of alcohol could make the body produce substances that can catch fire.
