Marauding dogs kill Malawi woman, injure baby in Lilongwe

About five dogs Tuesday morning attacked and killed a woman in Lilongwe’s T/A Njewa area and left a four-month-old baby she had strapped on her back seriously wounded.

Sources said the incident happened in the wee hours when the woman (identity yet to be established) was on her way to work in her maize field following her husband who had gone earlier.

“The dogs attacked her at around 5:00am and she was found lying in a pool of blood, her baby still strapped on her back, crying,” explained an eyewitness.

He said when people came to the scene, the vicious dogs, whose owner is yet to be established, had already deserted the scene.

The woman and the baby were rushed to Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH) where she was pronounced dead apparently due to heavy loss of blood due to serious wounds she had sustained.

The Lilongwe police expressed ignorance of the incident but said they would investigate it to establish what happened and who owns the dogs.

On the other hand, KCH confirmed the development but had no full details at hand of the deceased, nor the actual village she hailed from.

“The woman had sustained serious injuries and when they brought her here, we tried to resuscitate her but in vain,” explained the hospital’s spokesperson, Mabel Chinkhata.

She said the two were brought by a ‘Samaritan’ of foreign origin who had found people from the community stranded with the wounded mother and baby and the man had offered to ferry them to hospital in his vehicle.

The baby, Rebecca Samuel, was immediately treated with anti-rabies drugs and, according to clinician, Anderson Kalombo, she is now safe and in stable condition.

“She was in a very terrible condition the day she was brought into this ward,” explained Kalombo. “She was bleeding and she couldn’t breathe properly and we had to put her on oxygen. We immediately treated her with anti-rabies vaccine which, very luckily, was available.”

As of Thursday, the baby was placed in the Children Ward’s High Dependency Unit (HDU) not because her condition demanded that she should be there, but because there was nobody to look after her except the nurses, according to the health authorities.

Meanwhile, the father of the surviving baby has pleaded with the hospital to identify someone to help looking after her but according to Chinkhata, the man who brought the deceased mother and the baby to hospital had offered to only be providing all the baby’s basic needs.

“This man is already providing the baby with milk, diapers and everything and he also helped with all the funeral arrangements for the mother,” explained the spokesperson for the hospital.

She added, “However, the man said he could only manage to assist the child but not adopting her so we have arranged to meet the father after all funeral arrangements are over and chart the way forward.”

KCH has since described the incident as very shocking and that as a health facility, they are very concerned.

“It’s very unfortunate that people leave dogs unattended to like that; what the public doesn’t know is that it is very cheap to prevent a dog from rabies but very expensive to treat a person who has been bitten by a rabid dog,” she observed.

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