Medical mystery of Kaleb Bussenschutt who cannot eat

This is a boy who cannot eat and how will this boy live his life if he needs needle infusion for 20 hours a day?

The issue needs to be identified, its a genetic problem maybe?

KALEB, 5, cannot eat. He does not just have a peanut allergy or a milk allergy. He is allergic to all food. The only things he can put in his mouth are water and a certain brand of lemonade .

He is fed for 20 hours a day through a machine that pumps nutrients directly into his stomach. Unless doctors can find a cure, he will never have his first beer, or a birthday cake, the Advertiser reports.

Source: www.theaustralian.news.com.au...

To be honest I am not surprised that this kind of disorder is popping up. Gratned given how many people are born these days, the chances of something like this occurring makes it statistically inevitable.

However, thinking that there's a lot of cases cropping up of people allergic to water, MANY food types, even certain air mixtures... even wi-fi (as brought up in a recent thread here), it makes one wonder if there's a causality based on how much sheer poo we're putting out into the ecosystem.

Dunno. It's a sad story either way. I hope there's something that can be done for that poor lil guy

Wasn't there a way chinese people found a way to cure people of peanut allergies.

Could this not be used here?

I developed an allergy to diary or egg products (I suspect) that caused boils after 27 years of life.

I don't know what brought it around. It could have happened after I took that last (yeah last) flu vaccination about 2-3 years ago, or I got an MRSA\staph infection while working at the hospital and diary products feeds the staph... I don't know, but when I cut out the diary products my condition improved greatly. These are only my suspicions.

I wonder if this little guy had any vaccinations, but these things can happen out of the blue, like babies that look like frogs or cyclops.

My daughter had vomit attacks when she was younger I took her to see the doctor and all she said is that it was Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome. The Doc never told me that it was an allergy...We kept on getting her Gravel but that didn't work finally we changed doctors and he gave us a prescription for antihistamines. Citric acid was the problem to her allergies.

reply to post by star in a jar


I can't have milk or ice cream it just makes me feel ill and a few days by the toilet

This is fascinating. Thank you for bringing this to light.

That being said...I feel terrible for the little guy. I can't imagine...

I wonder if it could be eosinophilic gastroenteritis. The child of a friend was diagnosed a few years ago, and she presented with remarkably similar symptoms. It's a very rare gastrointestinal disease that differs in severity by patient. Some sufferers, including that child, are dependent upon intravenously-administered nutrition--they cannot consume anything without subsequent violent illness; others are triggered by specific food. Some instances have no apparent relation to food whatsoever, though these seem less common (judging only by support pages and journalistic articles).

Eosinophilic gastroenteritis is sometimes called "eosinophilic enteropathy", a more general term. Wikipedia has a fairly simple explanation of the disorder; a much more detailed, clinical description can be found at Medscape.

I'll try to find a few articles or webpages that describe individual instances of this. It's a strange illness and certainly wreaks havoc upon those afflicted; my friend's daughter was quite literally near death when she was finally diagnosed.



[edit on 28/7/09 by paperplanes]

MSNBC reports a case involving a 12-year-old boy (from 2007) with eosinophilic enteropathy:

“Ill” is a mild descriptive for what Tylor went through for most of his life. He was 4 years old the first time he got violently sick after eating. By the time he was 6, the diarrhea and vomiting were getting worse, but his doctors could find nothing wrong with him, putting his digestive problems down to stomach viruses.

By the time he was 10, Tylor’s situation was desperate. He was passing out, going into convulsions and passing blood from both ends of his digestive tract. His weight was down to less than 50 pounds, his growth stunted, his body little more than skin and bones.

His mystified doctors took out his appendix, thinking that might be the problem, but he showed no improvement.

Last September, specialists at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where he’d been undergoing tests since April 2006, realized that what Tylor had wasn’t a stomach virus but an extremely rare condition called eosinophilic enteropathy.

The disorder causes his intestines to produce too many white blood cells that act as an immune system and attack food passing through the gut.

Doctors found that he was allergic to nearly everything he ate, including wheat, gluten, dairy products, eggs and soy products.

They took him off all food, feeding him a liquid formula through a gastric tube inserted through his nose. They then introduced him to one food at a time, making sure he could tolerate it before adding another. Recently, tuna joined chicken as a protein source.

Although Tylor could eat again, he still needs to be fed vitamins and minerals in liquid form.

Since getting the stomach tube and finding solid foods he can eat without getting sick, Tylor is thriving.

From what I can tell, this is a common result. Though food is not the culprit for all patients with eosinophilic disorders, those that are triggered by food begin to recover when the proper diet is introduced. Sometimes the proper diet is no food at all, with nutrition provided intravenously. Though the child in the story above is recovering quite well, my friend's daughter is still--after a few years--almost entirely reliant upon liquid nutrition, and it remains to be seen if she will ever be able to eat normally.


[edit on 28/7/09 by paperplanes]