Tot killed in freak battery incident

TRAGEDY . . . toddler Eliza Bashir

A one-year-old girl died days after swallowing the tiny battery from a torch, an inquest heard yesterday.

Eliza Bashir, of Monmouth Street, Oldham, died in March 2013 — six days after having a button battery surgically removed at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, burned the inside of Eliza’s oesophagus - the connecting tube between mouth and stomach. She bled to death eight days after swallowing the battery.

Swallowed batteries can burn tissue by discharging electric circuit, and fluid inside the battery can also damage tissues.

In Eliza’s extremely rare case a heart abnormality meant one of her main arteries ran directly alongside the oesophagus. The damage eventually tore the artery and Eliza died. Without the unknown abnormality, which affects only one in a hundred people, she would not have died.

Eliza’s mother, Naheed Bibi, said she had turned her back for only a second to get a bottle of milk when her daughter swallowed the battery - which had come from a small torch.

Dr James Craige, who performed the surgery to remove the battery, said though nothing more could have been done for Eliza, he and his colleagues are worried that they still don’t know how best to deal with such incidents.

He said: “This has worried us all, the main reason being that it still remains very hard to determine the best way to treat patients like Eliza who have swallowed a button battery.

“We would only know she had the heart abnormality if we were looking for it and even then operating would have been a bigger risk than to just leave her to heal.”

Coroner Simon Nelson is now writing to the Department of Health to encourage the spread of awareness of the harm batteries can cause if swallowed.

Mohammed Bashir, Eliza’s father, said: “It is really important that we spread the message to other parents and make sure nobody has to go through what we have been through.”