Devon parents' plea to keep baby alive

A baby girl from Torquay could die soon unless she gets a liver transplant.

One-month old Lottie Bryon-Edmond is in intensive care at Birmingham Children's Hospital with her parents Chris and Julie by her side.

Lottie is critically ill with rare condition neonatal haemochromatosis which means that toxic levels of iron have built up in her liver.

Lottie has been top of the super-urgent list for transplants for 14 days, but no livers have become available.

Her parents have been told by doctors that Lottie, nicknamed Chip, could die at any time.

Financial adviser Mr Bryon-Edmond, 47, said "She's a little fighter, but there's a finite amount of time and we need a liver today."

Only livers from a child who has died up to the age of 14 would be suitable because of Lottie's age.

Mr Bryon-Edmond said: "It absolutely destroys us that it has to come from a child of that age.

"But not one of us parents in the intensive care unit would think twice about donating our own or our children's body parts.

"It is not even a question to us and it shouldn't be to anyone else because you have a choice of either burning of burying those body parts or letting a little child like Lottie have a good life."

Her parents have appealed via the website Chip-BE for more donors to come forward in a campaign to get an extra one million people signed up as donors.

"We are still at the top of the list without a liver so God alone knows what people further down the list have to go through," said Mr Bryon-Edmond.

"They have to wait for months but we haven't got months and that's why we are top of that list."