Doctors Suspect Rare Disease Might Have Afflicted Indian Child

Courtesy of Anupama Chandrasekaran Dr. Narayan Babu, left, inspecting baby Rahul lying next to his mother Rajeshwari Karnan, right, at Kilpauk Medical Hospital in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

When 23-year-old Rajeshwari Karnan delivered a boy in May in Nedimozhinur village in Villipuram district of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, she and her husband, both farm laborers, were ecstatic. Their first child, born two years ago, was a girl, and Ms. Karnan was fervently hoping their second one would be a boy.

But the ensuing festivities came to an abrupt end nine days later. Ms. Karnan said that during her stay at her mother’s home, as is customary following the birth of a baby, she stepped outside the coconut-palm thatched hut one afternoon to bathe her 2-year-old daughter after putting her son, Rahul, to sleep. Suddenly, she heard him wail.

Before she could rush in to check on Rahul, a young neighbor, who peeped into their hut on hearing the child crying, yelled out the unthinkable. “Akka [elder sister], your baby is on fire!’ ” the girl said, Ms. Karnan recalled.

“There was a flame on his belly and his right knee, and my husband rushed with a towel to put it off,” said Ms. Karnan. “I got very scared.”

Ms. Karnan and her husband, Karnan Perumal, 26, rushed their child for treatment at a public hospital in Villipuram. After the attack recurred for the fourth time in late July and the parents had visited several hospitals, they faced another wave of trouble. The villagers forced them to move out of the village fearing that the child could cause a fire and burn the village. Mr. Perumal, Ms. Karnan, and Rahul had to find refuge in a temple in an adjacent village. The local press began reporting on their condition and the district administration intervened and moved them to Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, for treatment at Kilpauk Medical Hospital.

Ms. Karnan and Mr. Perumal told the doctors that their child would suddenly burst into flames during the afternoon. The doctors at Kilpauk hospital began considering the extremely rare possibility of spontaneous human combustion.

“We are in a dilemma and haven’t come to any conclusion,” said Dr. Narayan Babu, head of pediatrics at Kilpauk Medical Hospital, where the child arrived in early August with first and second degree burns and infected skin. “The parents have held that the child burned instantaneously without any provocation. We are carrying out numerous tests. We are not saying it is SHC until all investigations are complete.”

The vast majority of scientists are skeptical about SHC although the theory has gained some supporters in recent years. In 2011, an Irish coroner listed spontaneous human combustion as the cause of the death of a 76-year-old Irishman who was found charred to death but with no apparent source of the fire.

In a 2012 article in The New Scientist on possible mechanisms in spontaneous human combustion, the British research biologist Brian J. Ford pointed to a heightened presence of the inflammable chemical acetone, which is produced and disposed by the human body, in someone’s blood. Mr. Ford’s conclusions are based on his experiments that took scale models of people made from fatty meat that had acetone diffused into it. He found that the meat burned fiercely and left behind only fatty ash, just as in the cases of spontaneous human combustion.

“There have been a few cases where people have suffered S.H.C. and have swatted the flames out, leading to their complete recovery,” said Mr. Ford in an e-mail, referring to spontaneous human combustion. “In most examples it is fatal, as the cases are found after the event. Typically, there is just a pile of ash with protruding extremities.”

Since the parents’ claims first became public, the local media has been breathlessly reporting on the latest developments of the “fire baby,” including the test results doctors released on Tuesday that showed that acetone levels in the child’s blood were not high.

Moreover, doubts of foul play persist given that Ms. Karnan’s mother’s home in Villipuram district, 200 kilometers (120 miles) south of Chennai, is in a village where in 2004 several homes burned to the ground because of the presence of the highly inflammable phosphorous in the building material, a fact confirmed by local fire department officials.

During an interview on Friday in the pediatric ward of Kilpauk Medical Hospital, the petite, sari-clad mother was seated next to her now 3-month-old son, who clearly bore scald marks on his head and pale leathery burns on his abdomen and legs.

Courtesy of Anupama Chandrasekaran A television camera person filming Rajeshwari and her child Rahul at Kilpauk Medical Hospital in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

A crew from a regional television network was positioning their camera to get the best footage of the mother and the child on the hospital bed. Ms. Karnan remains stoic in face of the intrusion by the press and other inquisitive visitors. Last week a politician stopped by to offer some money.

“There were a lot of rumors floating about the reason for the child’s burns, including it being the work of God,” said J. Jayakumar, a Villipuram government official who visited Ms. Rajeshwari at the temple close to her mother’s home. “The crowds were swelling and we were worried about the child being blamed for a fire elsewhere in the village, for example.”

Mr. Jayakumar alerted the Villipuram district collector about the risk of a law and order breakdown and the need for medical treatment for the child, after which the government officials worked to transport the child and its mother in an ambulance to the Chennai hospital.

At Kilpauk Hospital, Rahul kicked around next to his mother before belting out a cry that Ms. Karnan interpreted as a demand to be fed. He settled for his nap after being breastfed. Even though researchers like Mr. Ford suggest that staying in a cool, temperature-controlled room could prevent spontaneous human combustion, there was a blue bucket filled with water next to Rahul’s bed.

For now several questions remain unanswered, and Mr. Perumal was well aware of the suspicion that surrounds his family.

“We are not crazy to burn our own baby,” said Mr. Perumal by telephone.

The authorities at Kilpauk Hospital, which has also provided psychological counseling to the couple, said the decision on the discharge of the baby will be taken jointly with the Tamil Nadu government. They are continuing psychological evaluation and counseling of the parents. All other medical tests have been done.

“Some people don’t believe us, and I am scared to return to my village and am hoping for some government protection,” Mr. Perumal, who has also heard about the sudden burning of huts in his wife’s village nearly a decade ago. “There is also the fear that our child could burn once again.”

Anupama Chandrasekaran is a journalist based in Chennai.