Beatrice Groth reports on a terrifying near-miss.
‘My one-month-old baby was rushed to hospital by ambulance and placed on oxygen for life support’, says worried mother Lizzy. ‘Thankfully she was later discharged.’
Baby’s doing fine now, but what happened and why? Lizzy believes that overcrowding was a key factor in this terrible accident.
‘My family and I, we are four in number and we live in one room, with a shared kitchen at the end of a corridor. My four-year-old daughter does not have enough space to herself, and she is always trying to play with her sister – carrying her around and so forth. I was in the kitchen on this fateful day, but little did I know that my elder daughter was back in the room, where her sister was sleeping. When I came back to the room I found my baby struggling to breathe and bleeding through her mouth.’
Lizzy believes that her elder daughter had turned the baby over, making it extremely hard for her to breathe, and bringing her to the point of suffocation. But she also believes that overcrowding is principally responsible: if the older girl had her own room, and if the shared kitchen was not so far away from the single room the family has to share, the incident need never have happened.
In March 2010, East London Housing Partnership reported that ‘around 37,000 families live in overcrowded conditions in East London. Of these, over 6000 households live in severely overcrowded conditions….lacking two or more bedrooms.’
Asked if there had been any developments since the incident, Lizzy reported that: ‘my baby is back home, and the authorities have promised to look into our housing problem.’
