Chips with everything

16.11.06: THE DEBATE over chipping took a strange but welcome turn when little Keri P, who is four next week, was reunited with her jubilant mother, Jackie, after an agonising 18-week absence.

Keri, who was born in Bromsgrove, was chipped at birth as part of a pilot security programme. She was abducted in the spring by her father, a Brazilian surgeon, now working in northern Mexico. Thanks to the device, she was detected by the American police during a shopping visit across the border to the Cielo Vista mall in El Paso, Texas.

Speaking at a press conference at Birmingham International airport, Amy Fellowes, spokesperson for Families Without Children, said that many abducted children and teenage runaways could be saved if all children were routinely chipped at birth. A hand-held scanner detects the chip, and information is relayed by computer to a radio transmitter, then on to a central databank.

However, Sally Owen, spe