A Danish mum has been sentenced to four years in jail for draining more than a pint of blood from her young son as often as once a week over a five-year period.

The court in Herning, said the mum, 36, who is a trained nurse, performed 110 drains using a catheter on the boy between the ages of one and six, and told hospital doctors that his low blood count was due to a rare bone marrow disease.

The court said on Thursday that doctors got suspicious of the now seven-year-old boy’s blood count and alerted police, who secretly filmed the 36-year-old.

The mum suffers from a mental condition where parents or caregivers make a child ill to attract attention (Picture: Getty Images)

A court-ordered psychiatric report said she suffers from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental condition where caregivers make a child ill in order to attract attention to themselves.


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A court heard how she has been draining blood from the boy’s chest from he was just 11-months old, Danish publications said.



She told the court: ‘It wasn’t a decision I just made. I don’t know when I started doing something I didn’t have to. It happened gradually. I flushed the blood down the toilet and burned the syringes in the bin.’

She drained around 500mm of blood from his chest each time (Picture: Getty Images)

When asked why she did it, the single mum said: ‘I wish I could answer you, but I can’t. I wish I could.’

Police set up a CCTV cameras in the woman’s home and watched as she drained blood into nine syringes from veins in the boy’s chest.

The boy is healthy and lives with his dad.

The woman was not identified.

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