Alfie Evans update: Parents 'give severely ill toddler mouth to-mouth resuscitation' to keep him alive
The parents of severely ill toddler Alfie Evans have reportedly claimed they had to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep him alive after his life support was switched off.
His father Tom Evans made the claim to reporters gathered outside the Liverpool hospital where the child remained on Tuesday night, the Mirror reported.
Mr Evans was reported as saying: "Both Kate and I had to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation to keep him alive because his lips turned blue."
Photos circulated on social media showing the little boy being hugged by his mother, with no ventilation tube obvious.
The Standard has approached the hospital for comment.
Mr Evans and Alfie’s mother Kate James sought permission from a High Court judge to take the 23-month-old out of Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital.
His father had said Alfie’s life support machine was switched off on Monday evening, but that he had been breathing on his own since then.
The boy has been at the centre of an ongoing legal battle over treatment administered to him.
But judge Mr Justice Hayden said on Tuesday: “This represents the final chapter in the case of this extraordinary little boy."
He added that Alfie was "a fighter, resilient, courageous" and said he should be "cared for, on his final days or hours, however long it may be, in a hospice or home or on a ward".
But Mr Justice Hayden ruled there was no substance to the parents' application by the Christian Legal Centre, representing Alfie's parents, to move him to a hospital in Italy.
Mr Justice Hayden was asked to allow medical experts in Italy, where he has been offered treatment and granted citizenship, to examine Alfie.
Judges have heard that Alfie, born on May 9 2016, is in a "semi-vegetative state" and has a degenerative neurological condition doctors have not definitively diagnosed.
Mr Justice Hayden said at Tuesday's hearing that Alfie's brain had been "damaged entirely and so too had the capacity of sight, hearing, taste and sense of touch".
"A brain cannot regenerate itself, as I have been told," he added.
