Kailee's condition deteriorates as radical drug treatment fails

Kailee Wells - the six-year-old whose adoptive mother travelled from America to China this year in search of relatives for a bone marrow transplant - is back in hospital after radical treatment apparently failed.

Kailee, who suffers from severe aplastic anaemia, will undergo a bone biopsy this week to shed further light on her fading condition.

'So far the results have been disappointing,' said her adoptive father Owen Wells, of Albuquerque, New Mexico. 'And her blood tests - which she has once or twice a week, depending on how grave or good they are - were at an all-time low recently. Not good news.'

Doctors said that without a miracle breakthrough, Kailee now has just weeks, not months, to live.

She has been kept alive by chemotherapy, steroids and a cocktail of drugs but needs a bone marrow transplant from an exact DNA match to survive. The best chance of finding a match is from a member of her biological family.

Kailee was abandoned when she was 10 days old - left on the doorstep of a now demolished teachers' college in Changde, Hunan.

Her plight was first reported in the South China Morning Post, and captured national and international attention when her American mother Linda Wells travelled to the mainland in February to search for the biological family.