second degree burnsA retired medical man and modest friend of Quadrant writes:

I have been following reports of Baby Asha with some interest in hope of learning the extent of her injuries. I assumed they must be very bad to have required an airlift from Nauru and extended hospitalisation. In reading the SMH online today (I have refused to buy that newspaper since since 2009), I notice that she was admitted almost a month ago. Poor kid’s burns must be horrible, I thought.

As has been reported and subsequently put to rest, there were allegations that child’s parent(s) inflicted the injuries in order to have her brought to Australia and themselves as well. This prompted the hospital to release (or leak) Baby Asha’s file and the SMH has helpfully re-produced the key document on its website.

I now learn that Baby Asha has burns on 3% to 4% of her total skin area, toughly the size of a small saucer. It would have been very painful when it happened, most certainly, but this is definitely not an injury one would imagine required an air ambulance and almost a month in an Australian hospital bed. Surely the appropriate care could have been rendered on Nauru.

Might I suggest you look up “superficial partial thickness” to get a better understanding of what it means. They are what used to be known as “second degree” burns. These destroy the thin top layer of skin and damaged the tissue beneath. 

So we followed the doctor’s orders and found this, courtesy of the Victorian government:

These burns heal spontaneously by epithelialisation within 14 days

As our medical correspondent notes: “I will not fault the child’s treatment at the hospital, which enjoys, and deserves, a first-rate reputation. What I do wonder about is the cost of this drama. A solid six-figure sum is my guess. I have not examined the child, but even from my comfortable chair I catch the smell of something peculiar.”

For more on the treatment of burns in children and descriptions of wounds that do and do not require hospital stays, follow this link. For the SMH account, consult the link below.

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