Leaving babies, especially newborns, unattended is highly ill-advised. A mother in the Pasir Jambu village in Bogor regency found this out the hard way when her newborn was attacked by what she described as a large rat.
According to reports, Pasir Jambu resident Lisda Wati put her one-month-old baby, named Aqilah, to sleep last Friday evening and went to take a bath. Her husband, a motorcycle taxi driver, was out working.
Soon after, Lisda heard Aqilah crying and rushed to her side to find a large rat gnawing the face of the infant. The rat skittered off when Lisda entered the room.
“On [Aqilah’s] face there was blood from the rat’s bites,” Lisda told Liputan 6.
Lisda first took Aqilah to a village nurse before taking the baby to the Cibinong General Hospital, where she received a tetanus shot and had her nose stitched up.
Lisda said the rodent looked like a sewer rat.
“Our house is under renovation. But we have no money so that’s on hold. So rats have been coming in through holes on the floor,” she said.
Doctors said that it’s unlikely that Aqilah would suffer long-term injuries from the incident, and the baby is expected to make a full recovery.
While Indonesia has seen a middle class boom in the past couple of decades, the country still suffers from a huge wealth gap problem. According to World Bank data, 25.9 million out of Indonesia’s population of 264 million live below the poverty line, while 20.19 percent of the population are vulnerable to falling into poverty.
When lower income citizens struggle to make ends meet on a daily basis, keeping up standards of hygiene is often the least of their worries.
Reader Interactions