16 year-old boy with body of 2 year-old

RATCHABURI: -- He could, perhaps, have been a normal, healthy-bodied boy. But extreme poverty had kept a 16 year-old living in Ratchaburi Province in a body more suited to a two year-old, weighing a mere nine kilograms.

One of seven children, Sompong Saetan from Pak Tho district was born with learning difficulties. Refusing to eat solid food, he grew up drinking only milk, and then rice milk when the family finances could no longer cope with the volume of cow’s milk he was drinking.

His 64 year-old mother, Mrs. Thiem, says that the learning difficulties first became apparent when Sompong was two years old. When she took him to see a doctor, she was told that his condition could be treated. But without money, she was unable to afford medical treatment, and left her son to subsist on nothing but rice milk for the next 14 years.

Although Sompong is unable to speak, he can, according to his elder sister, understand all that is said to him. A loner, he spends much of his time with a cloth over his head, as he is afraid of sunlight. Despite his tiny size, a mere nine kilograms, he is a fast walker, and likes riding on motorbikes.

--TNA 2004-10-24

When I read this, it reminded me we are in a country

where there is still extreme poverty and why it is so

inappropriate for the Prime Minister to have spent

all that money on getting his own Airbus and

be talking about sending an astronaut into space......

This is bullshite. Not possible. Either an extreme exaggeration or what some would call creative journalism.