But most treatment is still paid for privately – the view in the medical profession remains that helmet therapy is unnecessary.There are also concerns that parents will start putting babies to sleep on their stomachs to try to avoid plagiocephaly. Philip Saich, who runs the charitable organisation Headstart4Babies to raise awareness of plagiocephaly, has advised 700 families over the past year There are now three helmet therapy providers in the UK. After 18 weeks, it was down to just 3mm and the helmet was removed for good.With such astonishing results, it is unsurprising that helmet therapy is taking off. When she was measured after eight weeks, the asymmetry was reduced to 1.2cm. A plaster cast of the head is taken to get a perfect fit, and the stiff foam lining inside the moulded plastic helmet is then filed away to allow for growth in the flattened areas In this way, as the head grows, it fills out the gaps Tabitha wore her helmet for 23 hours a day.

This measurement is the difference between the short and the long diagonal: below 1cm is normal; 1 to 2cm is moderate and 2cm is severe.The principle behind the helmet is simple. If helmet therapy were so fantastic, why couldn’t I access it through conventional channels? I was finally goaded into action by a chance meeting with one of his patients, the son of one of my sister’s friends. The little boy was nearing the end of 16 weeks of helmet therapy and his head looked almost perfect. I took Tabitha to see Dr Blecher a few days later and after measuring her head with callipers he told me that she had severe plagiocephaly, with asymmetry of 2.4cm. He e-mailed me back immediately, saying there was “significant deformity” I still didn’t act. He confirmed that she had positional plagiocephaly and said that although she would always have a slightly misshapen head, it would become less obvious as her head grew.

He said that he had recommended some parents to Dr Blecher and they seemed happy with the results but there weren’t official studies “If Tabitha were your daughter, what would you do?” I asked “I wouldn’t do anything,” he said.But I still had doubts I e-mailed Dr Blecher some photos of Tabitha. So I made a private appointment with Dr David Dunaway, a plastic surgeon. I didn’t contact him, not only because I hated the idea of a helmet but also because I was suspicious of why the treatment wasn’t available in the UK.Instead I tried moving Tabitha’s head round in the middle of the night But as the weeks wore on, it seemed to be getting worse. The only specialist I could find who was treating patients in the UK at the time (mid 2004) was a German maxillofacial and craniofacial surgeon called Dr Chris Blecher. It does not affect brain development or function.Aside from the repositioning techniques my GP had mentioned, treatment for the condition took the form of something called helmet therapy: the baby must wear a specially designed helmet for several months. I discovered that positional plagiocephaly or flat head syndrome is a cosmetic condition which occurs when a baby’s soft skull is subjected to prolonged pressure, causing the head to become misshapen. I learnt later that this sort of reaction to plagiocephaly – the name of my daughter’s condition – is typical.

A survey carried out by Plagio UK, an online support group, has shown that eight out of 10 of its 500 members first learnt about plagiocephaly from somewhere other than a medical source.
I didn’t feel happy after returning home from seeing my doctor, and had a look on the internet. He suggested a few ways of encouraging her to lie on the left side of her head, but reassured me that her head would correct itself naturally. I took her to my GP, who said that it was perfectly common for babies to favour one side while sleeping and flatten their heads as a result. The right side – the one she always slept on – was very flat while the left side seemed to be bulging out to the left. My daughter, Tabitha, was nearly two months old before I noticed anything wrong. One day, while bathing her, I looked down at her wet head and was suddenly struck by its shape. An HPA spokesman, Hugh Lamont, said: “The disease was contracted in the south and he had not attended school locally, so there is no reason for concern in the local community.”.

The disease has now spread to older children and to neighbouring areas.The outbreaks in Doncaster andin the travelling communities have contributed to the rise in cases but the Health Protection Agency and Department of Health said the increase was not a result of the low take-up of the MMR vaccine.The HPA said travelling communities were more likely to contract measles because they traditionally had less contact with local health services and were therefore less likely to be vaccinated.The boy in Rochdale died last month, and 34 children who were in contact with him have been vaccinated. The worst outbreak has been in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, where 32 children have confirmed cases and a further 36 are being investigated.The first Doncaster infections developed among children at a playgroup who are less than a year old and therefore too young to have had the MMR jab. A more recent study in the same journal concluded that there was no evidence of a link. But eight years on, only 81 per cent of children have the MMR jab before they are two. The World Health Organisation recommends 95 per cent coverage to prevent outbreaks.One hundred people have caught measles in Britain in the first three months of this year, compared with 76 in the whole of 2005. He was already receiving drugs for a lung condition when he contracted measles and his condition affected his ability to combat the virus.