Tennessee: A six-year-old girl sheds her entire skin every day like a snake and the new skin grows immediately surprising everybody including doctors.
Hanna Barrott from Ooltewah in Tennessee has a skin condition called lamellar ichthyosis because of which her skin cells shed and grow back unusually faster than expected.
Hanna’s parents Megan and Tyson apply lotion to her dry skin twice a day to stop it cracking, bleeding and potentially getting a fatal infection. They also make sure that she doesn’t sweat because the glands are blocked by the skin and that causes her to faint.
Megan said. “Hanna’s condition means her skin grows a lot quicker than other children and she struggles in the heat because she can’t sweat. We have to moisturise her skin twice a day and exfoliate because of all the dead cells that fall off all over her body. If she doesn’t have lotion her skin will dry out, crack, bleed and then those areas can get dangerous infections too”.
Megan added when Hanna was born, she was monitored closely and required breathing assistance because the dead skin was blocking her airways.
She said. “She had splits across her skin, her lips looked blood red, her skin was so tight from the collodion membrane that her chest couldn’t expand for her to breathe. It was hard for her to breathe through her nose; nurses had to keep her alive for five hours by regularly pushing a button for oxygen.”
Lamellar ichthyosis is a rare inherited skin disorder, affecting around one in 600,000 people. Infants with this condition are typically born with a tight, clear sheath covering their skin called a collodion membrane.