Ever seen the ingredients list of those old timey-wimey sleep medications?
It helps that they have gone viral a while back, but if you missed out on those memes, here’s a quick recap.
In the days before research and the FDA was established (so, about the whole of human history and through the Victorian era until the early 20th Century) medications of all kinds – for both adults and children, mind – contained some ingredients we would now consider hard drugs.
Ever considered giving your children sleep medication that contains cocaine mixed in with whisky? It’ll knock their lights out, that’s for sure!
Now, to be clear, we can joke about this now because harmful substances like those are now tightly regulated so as to not cause health problems.
Remember, these things were administered to young children and babies back in the day – if they weren’t contributing to the child’s early death, they were definitely causing a lifelong addiction.
Not exactly something you would want to feed your children.
Unfortunately, it seems like Nadezhda Yarych didn’t pick up the memo.
The Russian native from Shebekino, a town in the Belgorod Oblast region, is presently under investigation for causing the death of her 8-month-old son.
According to court documents, the boy had fallen ill and was taken to the hospital for a checkup.
There, they discovered the baby had gotten himself a viral infection – nothing out of the ordinary, as it is pretty common for babies to get infected, but potentially deadly if the child isn’t well cared-for.
Concerned that the baby’s condition may deteriorate, doctors suggested that the boy be kept under observation in the hospital until he recovers fully.
Yarych, however, refused, and allegedly later visited the hospital four more times on four separate occasions.
You would think that going to the hospital and being given the same diagnosis and recommendation multiple times would have made her consider having her child cared for by medical professionals, but she apparently refused.
So, did she just not trust the doctors to look after her child and chose to go home and care for him personally instead? We could only wish that was the case.
According to sources close to Yarych’s family, the mother apparently didn’t want to miss the holiday celebrations and spend the whole time watching over her baby in the hospital.
So instead, she decided to put him to sleep by force-feeding him vodka.
Those of us who have partied too hard and got drunk will know just how harsh alcohol can be on the body. In babies, it is even worse, thanks to their low body weight.
Just a tiny amount of alcohol is more than enough to poison them, causing dangerous side effects such as low blood sugar, low blood pressure, low heart rates, and – more alarmingly -comas, seizures, and death.
You can probably guess which side effect this already ill baby got from the forced alcohol ingestion. He passed away on the 5th of January.
Yarych and her husband have since then been charged with child abuse with allowing this to happen without interference respectively.
Hopefully, future incidents like this won’t ever happen again.
