Ill boy's parents fight extradition

U.K. couple flee to Spain to seek new treatment for son

This is an undated handout photos issued by England's Hampshire Police on Monday Sept. 1, 2014,  of Brett King and Naghemeh King, the parents of Ashya King, who have legal proceedings against them continuing in Spain after they took the five-year-old brain cancer patient out of hospital without doctors' consent.  Critically-ill 5-year-old boy Ashya King driven to Spain by his parents is receiving medical treatment for a brain tumor in a Spanish hospital as his parents await extradition to Britain, police said Sunday Aug. 31 2014. Officers received a phone call late Saturday from a hotel east of Malaga advising that a vehicle fitting the description circulated by police was on its premises. Both parents were arrested and the boy, Ashya King, was taken to a hospital, a Spanish police spokesman said. (AP Photo/Hampshire Police)
This is an undated handout photos issued by England's Hampshire Police on Monday Sept. 1, 2014, of Brett King and Naghemeh King, the parents of Ashya King, who have legal proceedings against them continuing in Spain after they took the five-year-old brain cancer patient out of hospital without doctors' consent. Critically-ill 5-year-old boy Ashya King driven to Spain by his parents is receiving medical treatment for a brain tumor in a Spanish hospital as his parents await extradition to Britain, police said Sunday Aug. 31 2014. Officers received a phone call late Saturday from a hotel east of Malaga advising that a vehicle fitting the description circulated by police was on its premises. Both parents were arrested and the boy, Ashya King, was taken to a hospital, a Spanish police spokesman said. (AP Photo/Hampshire Police)

LONDON -- The parents say they want to give their 5-year-old-boy with a brain tumor the best chance to live with a revolutionary new treatment they learned about on the Internet. Their British hospital says the boy has a 70 to 80 percent chance of survival with the treatment it already offers and that the parents are putting the child at risk.

Britain has become riveted by the case of little Ashya King, whose parents plucked him from a hospital in southern England and fled to Spain after a dispute over treatment -- with British justice close on the family's heels.

Brett and Naghemeh King signaled Monday that they would fight extradition, defying doctors and the legal system as a British court considers a ruling on forcing the family to come home.

"I'm not coming back to England if I cannot give him the treatment I want, which is proper treatment," Brett King said as he cradled the child in a video posted before his arrest. "I just want positive results for my son."

The Kings are seeking a new type of proton beam radiation therapy that typically costs at least $33,000. The Southampton General Hospital says that more conventional methods have a very high chance of succeeding. It said that while proton beam therapy is effective for some tumors, in other cases "there isn't evidence that this is a beneficial treatment."

The family fled to Spain in hopes of selling a property to obtain enough cash for treatment in the Czech Republic or the United States. Police pursued them. Prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for an offense of cruelty to a person under the age of 16 years, hours after the Southampton hospital realized their patient was gone.

British authorities traveled to Spain to question the couple. Assistant Chief Constable Chris Shead of Hampshire Constabulary has said he would rather be criticized for being "proactive" rather than trying to explain later "why a child has lost his life."

The hospital's medical director, Dr. Michael Marsh, issued a statement late Monday saying the treatment was discussed with the family.

He put the chances of Ashya surviving under the hospital's treatment at 70 to 80 percent after five years. He expressed sadness that communication with the family had broken down and that "for whatever reason they have lost confidence in us."

Television images have shown the Kings being loaded into a Spanish squad car in handcuffs. When asked by the BBC on their views, the couple said they are just trying to help their child.

The family has criticized Britain's health care system, saying Ashya has a serious tumor that needs an advanced treatment option and that it wasn't being made available to him.

In a statement posted on YouTube before their arrest, the family took its case to the public after seeing their names and photographs posted on the Internet. Brett King said he feared being put under a restraining order after he disputed his doctors' advice, citing research he had gleaned on the Internet.

"I realized I can't speak to the oncologists at all because if I actually asked anything or gave them any doubt that I wasn't in full accord with them, they were just going to get a protection order, which meant in his deepest, darkest hour I wouldn't be there to look after him, neither would my wife," he said. "They would prevent us from entering the ward. So under that such a cruel system, I decided to start looking at the proton beam myself."

Proton beam therapy is a targeted type of radiation treatment that increases the chance of killing cancer cells by sending a higher dose of radiation directly to the tumor.

Unlike other types of cancer treatment, it doesn't indiscriminately kill surrounding healthy tissue, so there could be fewer long term effects. But experts say the treatment isn't suitable for children whose tumors are too advanced and need a broader dose of radiation.

In Britain, proton beam therapy is currently only available to treat certain patients with cancer in their eyes. Other countries, including the U.S., Switzerland and Japan, also use proton beam therapy to treat cancers of the spinal cord, brain, prostate and lung, and those that affect children.

Britain's health department announced in 2011 that it will build two treatment centers to make proton beam therapy available in London and Manchester starting in 2018. Until those facilities open, Britain will pay for patients eligible for the therapy to go to the U.S. and Switzerland for treatment.

The couple are both Jehovah's Witnesses, but there has been no indication they raised any religious issue about the boy's treatment.

"This has nothing to do with parents abandoning their child or with religious beliefs," the parents' Spanish lawyer, Juan Isidro Fernandez said, adding they brought Ashya to Spain "out of their love for him."

Information for this article was contributed by Jorge Sainz of The Associated Press.

A Section on 09/02/2014

Upcoming Events