Cancer-striken boy Ashya King, whose case grabbed headlines after his parents removed him from a British hospital, was undergoing scans in Prague today as Czech doctors said he could have a 70 per cent chance of survival.
The five-year-old's parents sparked an international manhunt after taking him from hospital in Britain last month, but doctors in Prague are hopeful lifesaving treatment could work if the tumour doesn't spread.
His parents Brett and Naghmeh King accompanied the boy to the Proton Therapy Center (PTC) in the Czech capital, where they arrived yesterday after a British court allowed them to leave Spain and returned them full custody of the child.
Jan Stary, head of the Prague Motol hospital children's haematology and oncology clinic, where Ashya is also being examined, said he could begin to receive proton beam therapy next week.
He estimated that Ashya had a 70-per cent chance of survival if all the treatment went well.
Proton beam therapy is said to be more precise than traditional radiotherapy, allowing doctors to deliver higher doses of energy to a tumour while sparing surrounding healthy tissue.
The treatment is scheduled to start on September 15 and last six weeks.
On Monday, after his arrival in Prague from Spain, Ashya also underwent scans at the Motol hospital where he is staying with his mother.
Motol spokeswoman Dita Vaclavikova told AFP the "results of all scans will most probably be available on Wednesday evening".
Ashya has been in the middle of a legal saga that began when his desperate parents whisked him away from a hospital in Southampton in southern England against doctors' advice on August 28.
They were seeking proton therapy, unavailable in Britain, instead of the conventional radiotherapy treatment which they believed would turn Ashya into a "vegetable".
Their sudden departure from Britain triggered a cross-border manhunt that saw the parents jailed for four days in Spain before being freed and emotionally reunited with Ashya at his bedside in a Spanish hospital.
