CHILD’S DEATH

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24882, 23 May 1946, Page 3

CHILD’S DEATH

SWALLOWED FLY POISON

(P.A.) AUCKLAND, May 22. •’This case is just a warning we can take. These things seem to be a menace to little children,” said the Coroner. Mr A. Addison, when concluding an inquest into the death of Alan Lewis Ireland, aged two years, a son of Mr F. G. Ireland. of Remuera, who died in the Green Lane Hospital on April 6. after swallowing some liquid fly poison. Shirley Millicent Ireland, mother of the child, said that on April 5 her son apparently went through the fence into the home o< Mrs Bedford. When the witness saw him with the neighbour he was very pale, and when Mrs Bedford said he had swallowed poison, the witness put her finger down his throat to make him vomit. She administered salt and water

as an emetic, and later took him to the hospital. Mrs Mimle Hewat Bedford said that when she was working in her kitchen she heard a child cough, and knew it was ; Alan Ireland. She went into the sunporch, and the child was holding a saucer containing fly poison. She asked if he had swallowed any, and when he replied that he had, she took him straight to his mother.

A verdict was returned in accordance with the medical evidence that the child died of arsenical poisoning after the ingestion of fly poison.