Great, you've chosen to spend the next half hour with assignment from the BBC World Service.

This week an upsetting but oh so intriguing story from Sweden about asylum-seeking children.

Until I met these kids, I found it really difficult to believe this was happening on such

a scale.

Anyway, see what you make of it and do rate us with your podcast provider if you find it interesting.

So Sophie's dad is just picking her up and she's quite a big girl actually.

The head is just falling down. He's putting her very carefully on a pillow there.

When I try to explain for the parents what happens is that the world has been so terrible so she has gone into herself and

disconnected her conscious part of the brain.

Sophie is the name we're giving this nine-year-old girl.

When her father picks her up out of her wheelchair, she's lifeless,

her eyes closed, a feeding tube running into her nose.

She's wearing a nappy or diaper.

This week's assignment on the BBC World Service explores this devastating illness.

It doesn't kill, but it keeps children in this apathetic state for months, sometimes years.

Yeah.

We will measure blood pressure now here.

Dr Elizabeth Haltcrants, a volunteer for the Doctors of the World NGO, examined Sophie.

We're in a small town in Central Sweden in accommodation reserve for migrants.

Sophie and her family are asylum seekers from the former Soviet Union.

Her blood pressure is anyhow quite normal, but she has a high pulse rate,

so it may be so that she reacts on us being so many people coming here today.

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