Baby could lose all her limbs in ‘worst meningitis case in 25 years’
HOOKED up to a tangle of wires and tubes, with her arm wrapped in bandages and painful sores on her skin, ten-month- old Kia Gott is battling for her life.
She has what doctors say is the worst case of meningitis C septicaemia they have seen for 25 years.
The baby girl faces losing all of her limbs, her hearing and sight, and could suffer up to 90 per cent brain damage. Surgeons have so far amputated one of her arms up to her elbow and one of her legs up to her knee.
Yesterday, as doctors were preparing to operate on her other leg, her father criticised health officials, pointing out that Kia contracted the infection after the NHS decided to stop giving a meningitis C vaccine to 12-weekold children.
Last year the age for the vaccine was increased to 12 months because so few babies contracted the illness in the UK.
Paul Gott, 35, has started a petition to have the rules reversed. Speaking to ITV News yesterday, he asked why it had to take ‘my little girl to lose all four limbs’ for something to be done, adding: ‘It makes me feel sick that they can just stop something that could save so many lives.’
Mr Gott described Kia’s rapid decline after he found an angry rash across her face, neck and chest four weeks ago.
The self-employed window fitter said: ‘Kia had just started walking, she had just started saying “ma ma ma’, just a normal baby coming of age, really. And then it’s all been taken away from me in a matter of hours.
‘She was just not herself. Nor- Smiley: Before her illness mally she was full of beans, trying to do everything. And she went from that to just nothing. She just lay there. She had a rash, she had a temperature.’
Her parents called an ambulance and paramedics had to drill into Kia’s shin to give her emergency drugs because her veins had collapsed, before taking her to Bradford Royal Infirmary.
Mr Gott and his wife Vikki, 30, were then told the devastating news that their baby might lose all her limbs.
An MRI scan also showed signs she might be left deaf, blind and severely brain damaged.
Despite her bleak prognosis, Kia’s parents are holding on to hope. She is now off a ventilator and breathing for herself, although she is still sedated.
An eye specialist said her eyes may still be healthy, although it is hard to do tests at this stage.
The Gotts, from Wyke in West Yorkshire, who also have a son Kayden, eight, and daughter Elsie, four, have set up a JustGiving fundraising page, which yesterday had reached more than £22,000.
Meningitis C, which can kill in mere hours, is a bacterial infection that causes swelling of the brain and can lead to septicaemia, or blood poisoning. Symptoms include rash, fever, vomiting, headaches, drowsiness and aches.
Babies can still receive a vaccine against the more common meningitis B bacteria.