SALT POISON CASE EXCLUSIVE - Mirror Online

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/salt-poison-case-exclusive-567120

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SALT POISON CASE EXCLUSIVE

IAN and Angela Gay were convicted of killing their sonm Christian by
means of an impossible act, made theoretically possible by a dodgy
expert, while the chief natural cause was ruled out.

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THE other day I tried to poison myself with four and a half teaspoons
of salt.
That, apparently, is what Ian and Angela Gay did to three-year-old
Christian Blewitt, the little boy they had taken into their home and
planned to adopt.
He'd been behaving badly, so they force-fed him the salt to teach him
a lesson. He went into a coma and, four days later, he died.
That at least, is what the prosecution says ...
The Gays were arrested, tried and convicted of poisoning him with
salt. Lock them up and throw away the key, you might say - unless, of
course, they didn't do it.
Let's presume for a moment that Ian and Angela are what their

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friends and family say they are - a loving and lovely couple, gifted,
rich, and kind - and the only thing they lacked in life was children.

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So let's test the science that underlies the deduction - because no

one saw it happen - that blond-haired Christian must have been
poisoned with salt by mouth.
That's why I poured four and a half teaspoons of salt into a pint of

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water, took a hefty swig - and threw up.

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Because I was reporting the story for both BBC radio and TV, I had to
do it again for the camera.
I drank five times and I vomited five times, a wholly involuntary
reflex. You just can't poison yourself with salt.
Now I challenge the Attorney General, the head of the Crown

KATE MIDDLETON,
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CAMBRIDGE

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who had a hand in the conviction of Ian and Angela Gay to knock back
a pint of water with four and half teaspoons of salt in it.
If they can't, then they might consider they could have helped commit
a terrible wrong.
The impossibility of force-feeding salt down anyone's throat without
them throwing up is just the first of a series of grave questions which
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HOUSE

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SALT POISON CASE EXCLUSIVE - Mirror Online

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/salt-poison-case-exclusive-567120

cast doubt on whether Ian and Angela poisoned Christian.

To begin with, the desperately ill boy was raced to hospital in Ian's
sports car.
There, doctors realised that he had a terrifyingly high level of salt in
his blood - but throughout the four days until his death, they couldn't
get the salt level down.
Quite simply, the moment Christian got to hospital his salt level
should have gone down because the source - his "evil" adopting
parents - could no longer poison him.
So if it didn't go down, then the cause of the salt overload had to be
something else.
As it happens, poor little Christian was not a well boy. The post
mortem showed that he had actually suffered a heart attack some
time before he met the Gays.
Why would a healthy boy have a heart attack unless he was suffering
from something else?
Had Christian died from arsenic or cobra venom, I'd shut up. But in
fact he died because he had too much of a substance that occurs
perfectly naturally in the body.
The number one cause of too much salt in the body is salt diabetes or
diabetes insipidus. Like classic sugar diabetes, if undetected, salt
diabetes can kill.
But one of the experts in the case proclaimed, at a pre-trial meeting:
"He clearly doesn't have diabetes insipidus."
So the jury heard nothing about salt diabetes.
Judge Pictures summed up: "Very sophisticated testing was done to
rule out all known existing disorders which might have caused that
high level of salt."
That's that, then. Or is it?
The Gays were convicted on the basis of complex calculations - and
those sums were based on the "seminal paper" on salt poisoning,
which plays up child abuse in the context of Munchausen's Syndrome
By Proxy.
That's no surprise because it was written by Professor Sir Roy
Meadow, the rogue child abuse expert who wrongly accused cot
death mothers Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and Donna Anthony of

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killing their babies.

Sir Roy has been struck off - though he is appealing that decision -

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but he is still an authority on salt poisoning. Or is he?

Prof Ashley Grossman, a neuro-endocrinologist at St. Barts, fears that
at least some of the 12 cases of salt poisoning in Meadow's paper
could be, in fact, salt diabetes.
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Prof Jean Golding, an epidemiologist at Bristol University, says

Meadow's paper lacks control groups, and is "unscientific and
unreliable".
What doomed Ian and Angela Gay was the exclusion of salt diabetes the number one natural cause of too much salt in the body - from
their defence. It can be caused by things going wrong in two different
parts of the body - the kidney and the brain, especially the pituitary
gland.

The experts tested the kidney and the adrenal functions and they
were normal.
And the pituitary gland? No tests were done because it has gone
missing.
So have the medical records for a large part of Christian's short life -

but we've seen medical notes diagnosing Christian as suffering from

hydrocephalus - water on the brain.
Prof Grossman knows of five papers where the condition has
triggered salt diabetes.

So how did Christian die?

Consider this. When your central heating is too hot, you don't
immediately assume the boiler's shot. You check the thermostat.
The human version is the osmostat - a collection of brain cells that
regulate the amount of salt in your body. If that goes haywire, then

you can have way too much salt inside you - naturally.
Unlike salt poisoning, salt diabetes in conjunction with osmostat
problems fits the evidence.
Grossman and Professor Pankaj Vadgama, a chemical pathologist,

consider this natural cause the prime suspect.

A couple who have never done anyone any harm in their lives, have
been found guilty of child-killing by means of an impossible act,
made theoretically possible by a dodgy expert who has been struck
off, while the number one natural cause of too much salt was ruled

jailed for five years in January after being convicted of manslaughter.

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against their conviction.

-JOHN Sweeney reports on the Gay case tonight on Radio Four's File
On Four at 8pm and BBC2 Newsnight at 10.30pm

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