Editorial Team
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Three-month-old fire baby Rahul was discharged on Friday with his mother insisting that she wanted to return to her village and refusing to stay in a child welfare council shelter. The baby had been admitted to the Kilpauk Medical College Hospital following complaints that he was suddenly catching fire without any source. Over 30 tests were conducted on the baby and none of them showed any evidence of spontaneous burns in the child. The doctors had conducted among others a gene analysis, a skin biopsy, a chromosome test but none of them showed any indications of spontaneous human combustion. They even invited a team from Sastra University to check if the boy s skin emitted inflammable gases but there was no answer. The hospital has handed over the findings of the investigation to the police and the child welfare agency for appropriate action.
His parents and maternal grandmother were also given counselling and none of them showed any psychiatric illness which made the case of child abuse also rare. The possibility of child abuse will of course have to be investigated by appropriate authorities and it can t be done unless an official complaint is filed.
Is spontaneous human combustion real?
For long the scientific community has doubted even the existence of a condition like this. As of 1995, there have only been 200 reported cases in the last 300 years. The most common scientific explanation is that food is converted into methane inside the body which when released by body pores can lead to a fire triggered by various sources.
At most times it s caused by an unnoticeable small source like a candle or a cigarette which goes undetected. An extensive two-year research project involving 30 cases of alleged SHC conducted in 1984 found that all the cases actually had plausible sources for ignition that was left out of popular accounts. At other times, the victim was either drunk or incapacitated in some other way which would make the victim unable to respond properly to the fire. As Benjamin Radford, science writer and deputy editor of the science magazine Skeptical Inquirer, asks If SHC is a real phenomenon (and not the result of an elderly or infirm person being too close to a flame source), why doesn t it happen more often? There are 6 billion people in the world, and yet we don t see reports of people bursting into flame while walking down the street, attending football games, or sipping a coffee at a local Starbucks.