Mother accused of injecting feces into IV bag of son with cancer

A mother in Indiana was accused of injecting stool to his son 15 years through intravenous bag that had connected the young during cancer treatment he was receiving at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis.

According to Marion Superior Court documents, Tiffany Alberts, a 41-year-old woman from Wolcott (Indiana) used a syringe to repeatedly inject her child's stool between November 13 and 17, putting it in A "situation that threatened his life or health".

The mother claimed that with these actions she was looking for her son to be transferred from the Intensive Care Unit to another unit at Riley Hospital, where she believed that "the treatment was better."

Alberts' son has received treatment for his leukemia at that medical center since early August this year, a Marion police officer said in a sworn statement. The 15-year-old was discharged but returned to the hospital a few days later, in early September, with fever, vomiting and diarrhea, the report said.

The child's blood tests showed that organisms, normally found in fecal matter, caused an infection that the extensive medical evaluation could not explain.

The child's blood tests showed that organisms that are normally found in feces caused an infection that an extensive medical evaluation could not explain.

With the suspicion that someone might be contaminating the patient's intravenous lines, hospital staff began monitoring their room with surveillance cameras. The images revealed that the mother was injecting a substance into the central intravenous line.

Alberts was taken to the Office of Child Abuse for an interrogation, in which she assured that what she was injecting him was water to "clean the medicine they gave their son, because he burned it."Later, he admitted that he was administering to the young man his own stool and stopping the feces in a gift bag hidden in the room's sink, since November 13.

The woman is accused of six counts of assault and one of negligence on a dependent, which resulted in serious bodily harm.

Dr. Veda Ackerman, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Indiana School of Medicine, said her biggest concern is missing the opportunity to keep the boy's leukemia in remission. He added that he "may have died from any of the episodes of septic shock he had, as well as from the leukemia he suffers, due to the prolonged delay in treatment."