Vampire Children

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Four years ago, a would-be vampire (vampiroid) was arrested in the Ukraine after luring street children into her home for their blood.
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Diana Semenuha, 29, believed that drinking blood could fend off a muscle-wasting condition. She kept the children intoxicated on drugs and alcohol and bled them regularly, selling the surplus to other black magic practitioners. When that weakened them, she dumped them back on the streets and lured replacements with the promise of a place to sleep and a hot meal.

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Police raided Semenuha's apartment in the Black Sea port of Odessa after a tip-off.

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Olga Buravceva, a spokesman, said: "The apartment was painted black, with all the windows covered with thick black cloth to stop natural light coming in. The only light came from black candles, and there was a heavy, sickening odour of some sort of incense in the air."

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Detectives found seven drugged children strapped to beds and benches, and a large, black knife and silver goblet engraved with satanic symbols.
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The Ukraine has an estimated 200,000 street children, whose widespread addiction to glue sniffing and alcohol made them easy prey for the woman dubbed the "vampire witch" by local media.
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Semenuha's arrest exposed an occult network in the city. Many claimed to have been taught by Semenuha and said that she would cut herself and let them drink her blood.

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One of the children, named only as Andrei, told police: "She gave me vodka and I sniffed some glue. But than she came up to me with a syringe and asked me to stretch out my hand. I didn't feel any pain because I was too scared. She drew the blood with the syringe and a needle and than put it in her silver bowl and drank it, murmuring in some strange language."

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Semenuha, who when arrested gave her profession as "witch", has admitted holding the children. "I let them sniff glue, but I paid for it and took a small amount of blood in return," she said. "But there was no violence involved, I also fed them and gave them shelter."
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Police fear that she could escape prosecution for corrupting minors and plying them with alcohol because the seven children found at her home have since escaped from care and gone back on the streets.

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Innocent children are meant to be protected by society, their parents, teachers and by adults generally. Hence when children become the victims of vampires or are displayed as vampires in novels, the reader will invariably squirm. This is even more true when it is an adult vampire preying upon a child victim, which made it all the more shocking when Lucy Westenra drank the blood of children on Hamsptead Heath in the novel Dracula. This is the only early vampire fiction to portray young children victimised by an adult vampire. This is surprising in view of the fact that the vampire of folklore is most likely to attack a close family member first, and that children in their total innocence are more likely to let the familiar, albeit undead, figure into the house and all too easily fall prey to it.
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Vampire children is also an unkind term for children with xeroderma pigmentosum, a genetic disease with such extraordinary sensitivity to sunlight that ordinary sun exposure results in the development of skin cancer at a very early age. Children with xeroderma pigmentosum can only play outdoors safely after nightfall. They have been called midnight children, the children of the dark, the children of the night and, perjoratively, vampire children.

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Xeroderma pigmentosum is due to defective repair of damage done to DNA (the genetic material), damage caused by ultraviolet light. Whereas normal persons can repair ultraviolet-induced damage by inserting new bases into the DNA, xeroderma pigmentosum patients lack the normal capacity to repair the DNA damage inflicted by ultraviolet light.
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A person with xeroderma pigmentosum develops severe sunburn and eye irritation within minutes of exposure to sunlight. Other signs of xeroderma pigmentosum include the development of ultradry skin (the word "xeroderma" means extreme dryness of the skin) plus blisters, heavy freckling and dark spots on the skin (the word "pigmentosum" refers to these pigmented areas of skin). Damage to DNA is cumulative; it is additive and cannot be reversed. Recurrent exposure of a xeroderma pigmentosum person to ultraviolet light can cause the rapid development of cancerous and non-cancerous growths on both the skin and eyes. Even children with xeroderma pigmentosum can develop skin cancer. About one in every five xeroderma pigmentosum patients also develops one or more of the following problems: blindness, deafness, mental retardation, poor coordination, spasticity, or retarded physical growth.

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The life span of xeroderma pigmentosum patients varies. Those with undiagnosed xeroderma pigmentosum who regularly expose themselves to sunlight may die young of skin cancer. Those with a diagnosis of xeroderma pigmentosum who protect themselves from sunlight may live a long life. The life expectancy of most patients falls between these extremes.
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Diagnosis requires tests on skin or blood samples. Although the disease itself is incurable, patients can maintain their health by: protecting themselves completely from ultraviolet light; getting frequent skin and eye examinations; and having cancerous growths removed without delay.
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Xeroderma pigmentosum is inherited as an autosomal recessive trait (meaning that the gene for xeroderma pigmentosum is on a non-sex chromosome [an autosome] and that a person must possess two doses of that gene to manifest the syndrome). In actuality, xeroderma pigmentosum is not one disease. A number of diseases clinically paint the xeroderma pigmentosum picture. Genes for xeroderma pigmentosum reside in diverse locations including chromosomes 3p25, 9q22.3, 11p12-p11, and 19q13.2-q13.3.

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