PALAKKAD: A 40-day old tribal male infant of Kuraman and Chithra couple from Onthumala in Jellipara died due to milk aspiration during the intervening night of Friday and Saturday. The parents noticed that the child’s hands and legs were cold on early Saturday morning. The child had been fed breast milk the previous night. Though the infant was rushed to the Kottathara tribal speciality hospital, the doctors certified it as “brought dead”.
This is the first infant death reported this year. In view of the standing directive from the Sub Collector on suspected unnatural deaths, a post-mortem was done on the infant at the district hospital in Palakkad. The infant that weighed 2.5 kilograms did not have any other ailments. This was the second child of the couple that eked out a living doing manual work on daily wages. The couple has another daughter also.
The mother had given birth to the child at a private medical college close to their native town of Onthumala. In the year 2018, 13 infants had died in Attappadi. Of them, five of them had died due to milk aspiration according to the doctors who attended to them.