'Baby Z'
A baby girl who faced a slow, painful death as her brain MELTED, is on the road to recovery after an astonishing world-first experiment.
‘Baby Z’s’ brain had begun to dissolve shortly after she was born 18 months ago because she had too much toxic sulphite in her system – an extremely rare condition for which there was no known cure.
Her prospects of survival were hopeless, but her parents and doctors in Melbourne refused to stand by helplessly and watch her fade away as the poison in her body ate her brain away.
Doctors and the little girl’s parents – who cannot be named for privacy reasons – began searching the world for any kind of drug or treatment that might give the baby even the slightest chance of survival.
They learned of a drug that had been successfully tested on mice in Germany back in 2004, but it had never been tried on humans because there were many ethical hurdles to overcome.
What followed was a determined and courageous effort by the parents and doctors on opposite sides of the world to give Baby Z a chance of life by treating her with the drug.
With the baby’s fate sealed if nothing was done, everyone contacted agreed she had to be subjected to what is now being described as ‘the biggest long shot in medical history’.
The incredible answer to the brave experiment came in the words of Baby Z’s mother, who told the Herald Sun in Melbourne that her little girl was now ‘absolutely delightful and as stubborn as anything..she has just started saying a few words and is constantly moving around.’
She added: ‘I refused to accept she would die. The procedure was a tiny bit of hope, but when you have nothing, that is a lot of hope.’
And pioneering neo-natologist Dr Alex Veldman, recalling one amazing day in his career, told how after within one month of receiving the special drug Baby Z just ‘woke up’.
‘It was really like awakening – it was just bang and she was switched on,’ he said.
The amazing case which has given hope to other parents with children born with the brain-dissolving condition known as molybdenum cofactor deficiency, which poisons the brain and kills within months of birth, emerges from days of sadness shortly after Baby Z was born.
Her toxic sulphite levels were nearly 30 times higher than normal and were literally dissolving her brain. Doctors shook their heads – there was nothing they could do to stop the deadly process that had begun in her tiny body.
But they were not going to give up and three weeks after searching for answers biochemist Dr Rob Gianello found a research paper by German plant biologist Professor Gunther Schwarz, describing the experimental drug he had used on mice and saved them.
In Melbourne Dr Veldman began the process that would lead to Baby Z receiving the drug, speaking in detail to Professor Schwarz and appealing to the ethics committee at Melbourne’s Monash Children’s Hospital.
Next came an approach to the Office of the Public Advocate, who in turn called on special medical procedure powers to convince the Family Court to allow the unique treatment to proceed. Within an hour of the court’s approval, Baby Z was given the drug.
Astonished doctors watched as, within hours of receiving her first daily dose of the drug, Baby Z’s sulphite levels dropped from nearly 300 to below 100. And within three days the levels were ‘normal’ at around 10.
Baby Z had suffered some brain damage in the weeks it took to find a cure, but her parents say she is now improving.
Her recovery has given hope to other parents and researchers are now planning human trials with a view to making it available to all babies suffering from the same brain-melting condition.
Bondi 'Caveman'
A ‘cave man’ living in a cliff beside Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach has been charged with raping a woman in his crude shelter after he had invited her to ’feed the wild birds’.
Peter Millhouse, also known as ‘Jimmy Two Hats’, was known to hundreds of thousands of people – locals and tourists – who have visited Bondi Beach and taken a stroll along a nearby cliff path, where he has been living in a cave for 10 years.
The local council tried to force him out of his unconventional home two years ago through a court, but lost the case.
There were no known problems involving 54-year-old Millhouse’s behaviour, but when a young woman travelled to Bondi Beach to look at an exhibition of sculptures set up along the cliff path, her visit spelled the end of his hermit’s life style.
According to a prosecutor at Sydney’s Waverley Local Court, the young woman went voluntarily to Millhouse’s cave on the invitation to feed the wild birds, but he then tried to kiss her.
She told him to stop, but he persisted, forced her onto her back and raped her, the court was told.
After the alleged attack, the woman fled along the cliff path and managed to flag down a passer-by who took her to police.
Later, the court heard, she led police back to the cave, where her flip-flops (thongs) and part of her beachwear was found.
Millhouse was charged with sexual assault, resisting police and two counts of assaulting police.
His legal aid lawyer, Mr David Covington, said both the sexual assault and the issue of consent will be strongly contested
Magistrate Lee Gilmour said she would be refusing bail ‘for the protection of the community.’
She added: ‘It’s a very strong prosecution case…returning to that cliff face (for Millhouse) is not an option.’
The magistrate said that given that the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition is on ‘and the number of people to frequent the area, clearly the protection of the community rates highly.’
A representative from the local council was present in court and said that Millhouse had never been given permission to live in the cave.
‘Maybe they should have removed him long before now,’ said the magistrate, ordering that Millhouse be held in jail until another court appearance next month.
The Bondi cave man, as many people knew him, wrote poetry in his crude camp and survived on donated food.
Rochom & me in 2007
In 2007 I travelled to northern Cambodia to meet a mysterious young woman, later nicknamed the ‘Jungle Girl’ after she had been captured naked on the fringe of a forest trying to steal food from a group of villagers.
Who was she?
A local policeman came forward to claim she was his long-lost daughter – the little girl, then aged 10, who had vanished while tending the family’s water buffalo. Rochom P’Ngieng, as his daughter was called, had been missing for 18 years. The policeman said the strange woman was definitely his daughter because there was a scar on her arm, a wound sustained as a child when she cut herself.
When I met Rochom in her family’s hut not far from the border with Vietnam, her long hair had been cut, she had been dressed and looked ‘normal’. But she couldn’t speak – and her father claimed that when she did talk it was almost like the chirping of an animal.
Here, then, are the latest developments – they are both curious and worrying. If the mystery woman is Rochom she would now be close to 30 years old.
According to her father, Sal Lou, the woman who had been making slow but sure progress over the past two years, having learned how to eat from a plate and wash herself, had now reverted to what he said was ‘monkey-like’ behaviour. She was making ‘cheep-cheep’ sounds and was half-walking, half-crawling around his modest hut in a small ‘like an ape’.
‘She is more wild now than when she was found two years ago,’ he says. ‘She’s gone back to the jungle in her mind.’
At first, he recalls, she was impossible to control. ‘Everybody around here called her the “half-animal girl” but she’s my daughter all the same and I love her.
‘She would hunch over with her hands almost touching the floor when she walked and she would make clicking and chirping sounds similar to a monkey. She shied away from strangers and tore at her clothes. For me and my family it was like trying to control an animal that had been living in the wild.’
But as the weeks went by, Sal Lou and his wife and family were pleased with her slow progress, even though he did not know what had happened to her during the lost years. To add to the mystery, when I met Rochom there were what appeared to be deep rope burns on her wrists, suggesting she had been tied up for a long period.
Now, despite the slow progress of the past two years, Sal fears he has lost his daughter again to the call of the jungle.
‘She stopped eating a few weeks ago and started to lose weight dramatically, so I took her to the nearest hospital, many miles away,’ he says. ‘She was beginning to tear her clothes off, just as she had at the beginning. She spent several days in the hospital, still not speaking and acting like a monkey with those animal-like sounds.
‘The hospital was doing her no good so we have brought her home. Now she is moving around all the time like a monkey and just last night she took off all her clothes and went to hide in the bathroom.
‘She was always trying to escape from the hospital. We had to hold her hand all the time, otherwise she would try to take off her clothes and run away.’
Dr Hing Phan Sokunthea, director of Ratanakkiri provincial hospital, confirms that Sal Lou had defied medical advice and taken the young woman out of the hospital. He says the woman has mental problems, which is not a surprising assessment of a person who behaves like a monkey.
Parts of the jungles of Cambodia are impenetrable and are said to be a haven for hill tribes who have shunned all contact with the outside world. Could Rochom have grown up with a lost tribe or even, as some have suggested, lived with a family of monkeys?
When I met the ‘Jungle Woman’ two years ago, I asked her through a Cambodian interpreter, then a Vietnamese speaker, if she wanted to go back to the jungle. She clearly did not understand me. She merely glanced at the open door of the hut, suggesting perhaps that the outside world was where she wanted to be, where she wanted to run…
I’d welcome your thoughts on this strange case.
Indian women work in a quarry
In a quarry in the Indian Punjab, just off the famous Grand Trunk Road, workers, many of them women, shift gravel. Picture was taken in 1974 as I drove past in an old van I had driven from London.
Ghouls and boys came out to play at the ‘Under the Blue Moon Festival’ in Sydney’s Newtown. Fangs got a little scary with blood dribbling down chins but the event had plenty of bite and those who made the effort to don their wings, file their teeth and join in a chorus of howls should be congratulated on the effort.
