Yahoo Lifestyle Social workers seize toddler weighing 65 kilograms in the UK
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Social workers from Newport city council in south Wales have taken into care one of the heaviest five-year-old girls on record in the UK.
In a case that has been called "a tragedy" by child protection authorities, the council were forced to intervene when the child's weight ballooned to more than three times that of the average five-year-old girl.
Newport city council say their decision to intervene was based on health concerns over the child's obesity.
When she was taken in August last year, she weighed 65.8 kilograms. The weight of an average five-year-old girl is around 19 kilograms.
The child showed improvement when she was weighed again recently, weighing in at under 51 kilograms in September this year. However, she is still double the normal weight for her age and registering an unhealthy BMI.
Tam Fry, of the UK's Child Growth Foundation, expressed concerns that no one had stepped in earlier, telling the UK's Sunday Times, "Since that child was one-year-old she would have been putting on weight, year after year after year. She must have been visible at nursery. Who didn't raise their hand and say, 'Look, something is going tragically wrong here'?"
Childhood obesity is on the rise in Britain, particularly in Wales, where more than 28 per cent of five-year-olds are overweight. Health officials are concerned at the worrying trend, as young children who are obese often experience health issues when they reach their teens, putting them at higher risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
In 2012 it was revealed through Freedom of Information (FoI) requests from 45 hospitals in Britain that a total of 932 children aged under fifteen had been admitted to hospital because of obesity in the past three years.
And, as only a third of hospitals responded to the requests, the total number is likely to be a lot higher.
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