A BOY aged three is having to be fed solely through a tube because he suffers with extreme allergic reactions to food.

Finley Ranson’s young body reacts to food by treating it as a virus, causing him to bleed internally.

He had been surviving on just ten Fox’s Glacier mints a day while also being fed a highly-nutritious liquid formula through a feeding tube six times a day, but he has now grown tired of the boiled sweets.

Finley undergoes weekly blood tests, but his mother Rhys, a qualified nursery nurse, said he never gets down about his condition, eosinophilic enterocolitis.

She said: “It is totally part of Finley’s normal life now, he’s always had it.

“Breast feeding didn’t work because whatever food I ate was coming through the milk and he would still react to it.

“He was living on boiled sweets and his feeding tube for six months, but he does not like them anymore.”

His five-year-old sister Georgia suffers from the same condition, but only reacts to dairy, eggs and soya.

Rhys, 27, added: “He knows if any food goes in his mouth, he will be ill.

“If another child tries to put something in his mouth, he clenches his jaw as he knows they shouldn’t do it.

“We have never hidden him away from food though, we don’t want it to become a phobia in case in the future he can eat certain things.”

Finley’s condition is so severe, the drugs he takes to suppress his immune system are normally given to cancer patients.

As a result, Rhys and her 31-yearold husband Brett have to be wary of everything that is put into Finley’s body.

She said: “He has just had his 36- month booster jabs for polio and diphtheria and I’ve just had a call from Great Ormond Street asking me to check with my local doctors to see if the vaccines were live.

“If they are then as his immune system is so low, he could develop one of the illnesses and we’d have to take him to hospital again.”

Eosinophilic enteropathy is a complicated digestive system disorder in which eosinophils, a type of white blood cell, are found in above-normal amounts in one or more specific places in the digestive system and/or the blood.

Finley’s friends and family have helped raise more than £10,000 for research into the illness.