Calls are mounting to jail the caretakers of the 10-month-old baby who was given a vape to suck up, labeling the act as ‘child abuse’.
Disturbing footage shows the baby boy coughing and spluttering after inhaling the smoking device that was put in his mouth while being rocked, reportedly by his aunt.
Police have now visited a house in Kempsey on the NSW Mid North Coast where the baby incident took place.
2GB’s Ben Fordham called for the person responsible for feeding the baby with the vape to be put in jail.
“They have to do something here because this is child abuse,” Fordham said Thursday morning.
“Whoever is responsible, and anyone who witnessed what happened and didn’t report it, should go to jail.
Radio 2GB’s Ben Fordham called for the person responsible for feeding the baby with the vape to be jailed, but police are not expected to take any further action
Fordham said feeding the boy with a vape is essentially “child abuse” and any responsible adult or witness to the action should be behind bars
“People laugh, what’s wrong with people, your brain must be fried. You’re in serious trouble and you should be in jail for doing this to an innocent little child.”
Despite an investigation by NSW Police, ‘no further police action will be taken on the advice of government authorities’.
The disturbing images that surfaced in multiple videos showing the baby coughing after inhaling the toxic fumes led to furious demands online for the child to be removed from its mother.
In one clip you can hear a woman say, “Do you want to try it?” holding up the vapor before pressing it against the child’s lips and letting the boy inhale.
The child is seen writhing as he coughed with a woman watching his reaction, giggling.
Multiple videos have surfaced online of a mother forcing her baby to inhale a vape. The mother in the clips can be seen laughing as the boy coughs and sputters from the smoke
Daily Mail Australia understands the boy has since been taken to hospital for a check-up, and a family member told Seven News the child was fine after the incident.
Shocked by social media users, the child’s mother was criticized, one of them said F***ing disgusting behavior, as a mother myself I don’t know how people can do this to their babies.’
“That’s so sad,” another commented, with one person writing, “Every baby deserves a parent, but not every parent deserves a baby.”
However, the boy’s mother hit back at the criticism of her in an extremely foul-mouthed Facebook diatribe.
“Every bastard got the skin to sit there and talk about me and my child, look in your own backyard,” the mother wrote.
“You’re not perfect either, so shut up, you’re not scary, you’re nothing but bums.”
The boy’s mother then took to social media to defend her actions, saying no one is perfect in a foul-mouthed tirade
The incident comes as the number of poisonings from fumes among children under the age of four has risen alarmingly in the past year.
The NSW Poison Information Center received 213 calls about exposure to e-cigarettes and liquids in this age range in 2022, compared to 127 the previous year.
Symptoms recorded during these calls include nausea, vomiting, coughing fits, increased heart rate, loss of consciousness and in some cases seizures.
Genevieve Adamo, a senior poison information specialist for NSW Poisons Information Center, previously told ABC News that many calls were due to toddlers raising the vapes to their mouths out of curiosity, “as children do.”
“They say, ‘oh, the kid picked it up and put it in their mouth like a doll,'” she said.
Last year, the National Health and Medical Research Council released a report on e-cigarettes that found that vapors can contain hundreds of dangerous chemicals found in cleaning products, nail polish remover, weed killer and bug spray.
This is in the vapor, which is composed of various chemicals such as heavy metals – even if it is labeled ‘nicotine-free’.
