When someone’s house catches on fire, they call the fire department. So who do you call when a child catches on fire . . . four times? Just nine days after he was born, an infant in India was brought to the hospital with serious burns. As Nadia Harris reported, the mother found the baby on fire when she went to check on him. There was no obvious cause of ignition and no other evidence to explain how it happened.
After four months, (catching on fire three more times), there is no solid evaluation of the cause. The parents did research and came up with one possible explanation: Spontaneous Human Combustion (S.H.C). This occurs when a human bursts into flame from a chemical reaction without being ignited by an external heat source, Stephanie Watson explains.
S.H.C is a considered a medical mystery and has not yet been proven. It has been documented that in the past three hundred years, two hundred people may have experienced the condition. There was a case where a coroner listed S.H.C as a cause of death for a 75-year old male. His ashes were found in his bathroom, only his burnt arm and leg found at the scene.
Brain J. Ford explains that high levels of acetone in a person’s body can make them flammable. Doctors tested the baby and found nothing abnormal; besides the severe burns, he was perfectly healthy. This has led some people to believe it’s foul play, or child abuse.
Ms. Baker, the forensic teacher, suggests there has to be “concrete evidence” for either possibility to be valid. But there is evidence that the village they resided in, before they were kicked out, had random cases of house fires that had no apparent cause. Knowing this, aspiring medical student Rajani Kenea concluded that, “It is not child abuse, but the environment the child is exposed to.”
Either way, there is not a lot of information for a proper verdict. The parents are going through training for future prevention, and doctors are still investigating.
