From the Tampa Tribune, USA Today:

A baby girl who was born with severe deformities in Samoa and refused medical treatment in New Zealand has been brought to Florida for surgery with the help of THORN Ministries, an American faith-based group.

Miracletina Nanai, also known as ‘Baby Miracle,‘ is now six months old. (At left, with Kristin Taylor, left, and her mother, Mikaele Nanai.) Miracletina reportedly has deformities of the face, brain, spinal cord and palate, and is missing some fingers. After birth, doctors advised family and staff at the hospital not to feed her, but her parents reportedly snuck in milk and fed her with a plastic syringe when the nurses weren’t watching.

Because Samoa doesn’t have medical facilities needed to correct her disabilities, the country appealed to nearby New Zealand for help. But the New Zealand government denied the baby’s family an entry visa in December, saying there was no treatment that would benefit her quality of life.

Kristin Taylor, co-founder of THORN Ministries of Riverview, Florida, worked to get U.S. approval of visas and passports so the baby’s family could travel to Florida for up to six months. The approvals came after John Ragheb, chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Miami Children’s Hospital, and S. Anthony Wolfe, chief of the hospital’s plastic surgery division, agreed to provide medical services for the baby free of charge through the Child Foundation Inc.

“While we certainly cannot make her completely normal, she has a bilateral cleft lip that we can repair, a meningomyelocoele [spina bifida] and other bone defects of the skull that can be treated,” Wolfe said. “These are treatments we would do for any child in this country, so why not give Baby Miracle some of the same resources we would provide our own children?”

… Said a Child Foundation spokeswoman: “We don’t know if she’ll be able to see yet. We’ll know more next week. But she’s definitely going to survive. She’s a very healthy 5-month-old baby. She has deformities, but she’s a living, loving child, and her parents love her dearly.”

THORN feeds homeless people in downtown Tampa, and provides medical supplies to a hospital in Apia, the Samoan capital.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under blindness/visual impairments, medicine, normal, NOT2BEMISSED, spina bifida. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.