A couple fighting for compensation after their daughter was left brain damaged by a balloon are taking their fight to the High Court.

Nadeem and Shahnaz Butt are awaiting a date for the hearing of their case. They claim importers, ITI(UK), did not have an adequate warning on the balloon packet.

Their daughter Sonia, now ten, swallowed a balloon on November 10, 1996, and stopped breathing. She suffered extensive brain damage and is now blind, cannot speak and has severe spastic quadriplegia.

She has no control over her body and has to breathe through a tube in her throat. Her parents, aged 30 and from Great Horton, have to feed her through a tube to her stomach and she has to be turned every four hours to avoid pressure sores.

Today, the couple's Bradford solicitor Jaroslaw Stachiw, said he expected a hearing around July or August.

He added: "The potential damages are very substantial."

Mrs Butt said: "We are going to try our level best and go as far as we can."

Dennis Payne, managing director of ITI(UK), said: "It is now the subject of legal process and it's better to let the legal ball roll and not comment."

Sonia was 20 days away from her seventh birthday when the accident happened. She managed to crawl to the kitchen where Mrs Butt was working and the couple tried to save her.

Neither of them knew why Sonia had collapsed. Mr Butt found out later that while giving mouth to mouth resuscitation he was blowing up the balloon in her throat.

The balloon was removed in Bradford Royal Infirmary, but, by that time, she had been without oxygen for about 20 minutes and was clinically dead, her parents said.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents says an average of about 1,300 people a year have to be admitted to hospital with injuries caused by balloons.

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