Father injects son with paraffin

A ten-month-old child is lying in Iganga District hospital (Eastern Uganda) with rotting buttocks after his step-father allegedly injected him with paraffin in a suspected attempt to kill him. It is alleged that his step-father injected him with paraffin on both his buttocks after the boy’s mother refused to return him to his biological father.

Baby admitted
Hospital staff at the paediatric unit were on Tuesday struggling to save the boy’s (names withheld) life after he was brought in critical condition following a referral from Busesa Health Centre IV. The officer in-charge of the paediatric ward, Sr. Flavia Babirye, told reporters on Thursday: “The mother rushed here thinking that the child was suffering from anaemia but when we carried out medical examinations, the child was discovered to have been injected with paraffin.” He also had complications including respiratory distress. Nurses said he had suffered convulsions by the time he was brought to the hospital. “His behind part was rotting and we carried out incision and drainage in the theatre,” Sr. Babirye said.
Reports are still unclear about how much paraffin the boy was injected with although nurses at the hospital said it must have been a substantial amount.

“There was so much paraffin in his buttocks that when incisions were made during the surgery, a clear, brownish liquid flowed out. It smelt of paraffin,” a nurse who identified herself only as Anifa, said. “Paraffin is poison and reaction with the body is very fast. All the flesh particularly on the left side was all rotten. It had to be removed.” Nurses said when he was admitted to the hospital he was crying continuously.

Improvement
Ms Anifa said: “We had to keep him sedated all through. But now he is improving. He only cries when they are changing the dressing.” The boy, nurses said, was responding favourably to treatment. The hospital has in the past encountered several similar patients but mostly with complications after having ingested paraffin. This is the first case registered in the ward since the year begun.

The boy’s mother Sylvia Namulondo, who had reportedly refused to report the matter to police, was interrogated by police on Thursday after the hospital administration called in the law enforcers.
Ms Namulondo told Saturday Monitor at the hospital that she suspects the tragedy befell her son on the evening of September 6, following a disagreement with her husband over the boy’s continued stay at the home.

The couple has lived together for a year and three months. It was when her husband, a peasant farmer in Busesa in Bugweri County, Iganga, asked her to go to the garden and get sweet potatoes for supper, that she suspects the incident happened. She said her husband told her to leave the baby behind, a thing he would not ordinarily do because he hated attending to the boy, she said. She said an hour later, her husband came to the garden with the baby screaming.

Ms Namulondo said she was alarmed but she did not sense any danger because the baby was not bleeding. But even after nursing the boy he would not stop crying. It was late in the night that she realised the baby could not sit properly. “He cried all through the night,” she said. “The following morning, I saw the swellings. I thought it was anaemia so I took him to Busesa (health centre).”

The 22-year-old mother of two says when she got married she was about four months pregnant with her son. However, her husband did not know because she deliberately concealed it from him. “Ever since he discovered, he has been quarrelling, at the slightest provocation,” the young mother, said. “After I gave birth, he demanded that I return the baby to the (biological) father (in Kasolo village in Bulamagi) but I can’t take him there because I left that home following some disagreements.” She said: “He keeps telling me that there is no land or anything for this baby at his home. He has not hidden that he does not like my baby.”

Yet Ms Mulondo who has an older child aged six (from a different man) living with his maternal grandmother, had been reluctant to report the matter to police apparently because she feared for the worst.

At the hospital, the truth was revealed following the boy’s auntie’s account to the staff of how the stepfather had been constantly angered and had recently been mistreating both the mother and the boy demanding his departure. However, the 26-year-old man, who was arrested from his home for questioning, denied the allegation and says the injections were administered by his brother’s wife.

Beatrice