A Dereham mum has an anxious three month wait to find out if her son has been infected after he was pricked by a dirty needle. Samantha Bishop, 21, is facing what must be every parent's worst nightmare after her son Henri, who will be two at the end of the month, found a needle outside their flat in Beech Court, close to the High Street, on October 1.

A Dereham mum has an anxious three month wait to find out if her son has been infected after he was pricked by a dirty needle.

Samantha Bishop, 21, is facing what must be every parent's worst nightmare after her son Henri, who will be two at the end of the month, found a needle outside their flat in Beech Court, close to the High Street, on October 1.

She said: 'We were leaving the flat to take my other little boy to school. I locked the door and turned around and Henri had picked up a dirty needle with a syringe. It stabbed him in the hand.'

She said Henri was sent to hospital by his doctor where some of his blood was taken to test for HIV, hepatitis B and C.

He also had to have an injection to immunise him against hepatitis and he will have to have another three injections.

Miss Bishop, whose other son is six-year-old Harry, said: 'They are waiting to see if Henri has caught anything. We have got to wait three months to find out the results. It is very worrying. It is awful just not knowing, and all because somebody was too ignorant and lazy to put their dirty needle in the bin.

'Henri is such an innocent boy and he is being put through all of this for something that is not his fault or my fault.'

She said her children were too young to understand what had happened and that Henri was his usual self, but she added that she was now too scared to let them play outside.

While this was the first time she had seen a dirty needle near their flat she said there had previously been some needles near the rubbish bins.

Broadland Housing Association owns the complex of flats at Beech Court.

The association's deputy director (housing management) Anne Brighton said Broadland Housing Association had been liaising with police about the matter and that it had increased its inspections in communal areas at Beech Court to daily checks as a result of the needle being found.

A spokesman for the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital said it can take three months for antibodies to show in somebody's blood and so this is why there is a three month wait before someone can be told if they have been infected by HIV, hepatitis B or C. Sgt Mark Goodbody from Dereham police said that police had a record of the incident at Beech Court and that a drugs warrant was executed in Beech Court earlier this year.

He added: 'There is no recent increase in this type of incident in Dereham. Such incidents are quite rare in Dereham and probably a lot less than in other areas.'