Can A Baby Just Burst Into Flames? This child Has Spontaneously Combusted FOUR Times (Photos)

Like many mothers, Rajeshwari Karnan was delighted when she gave birth to a son. The 23-year-old farm labourer and her husband, Karnan Perumal, 26, already had a two-year-old daughter, but like many in the state of Tamil Nadu, they considered a boy a particular blessing. So when Rahul arrived in May, they were especially delighted. However, just over a week later, their joy turned to misery. One afternoon, says Rajeshwari, she was washing her daughter when she suddenly heard Rahul screaming from inside the hut. She ran towards him, but before she could get there, a neighbour shouted to her the words she will never forget: �Your baby is on fire!� �There was a flame on his belly and his right knee,� Rajeshwari told the New York Times last week, �and my husband rushed with a towel to put it off [sic]. I got very scared.� The couple immediately took their son to hospital, but the doctors were mystified. Later, the parents returned home, hoping this bizarre and disturbing occurrence would not repeat itself.But it has done � three more times, according to the couple. The last incident took place one afternoon last month, with their little boy suffering first and second-degree burns. As a result, the family have now been forced to move from their village, due to their neighbours� fears that the baby could cause a serious fire. This month, the couple took the child to be examined at a hospital in the city of Chennai, where the doctors are equally baffled. Foul play appears to have been ruled out, with Karnan Perumal saying that he and his wife would never be �crazy [enough] to burn our own baby�. Some people are saying the flames must be the work of a deity, while others suspect the use of combustible phosphorous in the materials used to build the couple�s home. But the doctors are now considering whether baby Rahul is a victim of one of the strangest and most mysterious of phenomena said to affect the body � spontaneous human combustion. �We are in a dilemma and haven�t come to any conclusion,� says Dr Narayan Babu. �The parents have held that the baby burned instantaneously without any provocation. We are carrying out numerous tests. We are not saying it is SHC (spontaneous human combustion) until all the investigations are complete.� Is it really possible for a baby to burst suddenly into flames? And if so, how on earth does it happen � and could other infants elsewhere in the world fall victim to the same extraordinary circumstances? Although spontaneous combustion has been written about for centuries, there are many who are sceptical about its existence. All too often, when presented with the grisly image of a pile of human ash with only the legs remaining, the doubters will insist that the victim probably died from falling asleep with a cigarette, or was sitting too near a fire. Such explanations may seem reasonable, but they ignore the fact that human bodies are extremely hard to burn. We are composed largely of water. And the bits of us that aren�t damp � especially our bones � require a huge and sustained amount of heat to reduce to ash. Crematoriums use at least 30 cubic metres of gas, along with 600 cubic metres of pre-heated air, to incinerate a corpse. If it only required a small log fire or a cigarette to burn a body, then such places would be put out of business. In fact, it is more absurd to suggest these mysterious fires are caused by an external heat source rather than some as-yet- unexplained bodily function. Human combustion has been gaining acceptance. In 2010, a coroner in Galway in Ireland recorded it as the cause of death in the case of 76-year-old Michael Faherty, whose charred corpse had been found lying on the floor of his living-room. So, if we acknowledge that the phenomenon does exist � how does it happen? One of the first serious accounts of it appeared in the august journal Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society in 1745, which recorded how a 62-year-old Italian countess had gone to bed one night feeling �dull and heavy�. The next morning, all that was found in her bedroom was a pile of ash and her legs. Many other cases followed, and by 1806, one scientist thought he had the answer. In An Essay On The Combustion Of Humans, Pierre Lair suggested that the problem was the demon drink, and he subtitled his article, Products Of The Abuse Of Spirituous Liquors. The explanation that alcohol was to blame quickly caught on, especially among moralists who were against the hard stuff. In 1832, a popular Victorian magazine claimed all those who suddenly burst into flames were �habitually drunken�. The notion was so widespread that when Charles Dickens included an episode of spontaneous human combustion in his 1852 novel Bleak House, the victim � the villainous Mr Krook � was said to be �continual in liquor�. The idea that an excess of booze can make the body more flammable seems, superficially, to make sense. Alcohol is flammable, so doesn�t it follow that drunkards make good kindling? Well, no. The science simply doesn�t bear it out. Even as far back as the time of Bleak House, a scientist called J. von Liebig tried setting light to human anatomical specimens soaked in alcohol, and they simply wouldn�t burn. In another series of grisly experiments, he even injected ethanol into rats and tried to set light to them, but they failed even to smoulder.