While most four-year-olds are feasting on sweets and burgers, four-year-old Annie Jones doesn't touch a morsel. She suffers from infantile anorexia, which, as Adrian Worsley finds out, has nothing to do with stick-thin models and poor body image.

AT children's parties Annie Jones feels alone at the table, furtively scanning the room to make sure none of her friends are watching her. She will try to swallow a dollop of blancmange or maybe a tiny scoop of jelly, but she's only doing it to feel normal.

Once away from the glare of the other children and their parents she'll perform the pathetic ritual that her frail body is all too used to - she'll throw up the paltry amount of food that she managed to swallow.

Unlike all other toddlers, though, she does it without tears or histrionics. She's been doing it since the age of 13 months, so why cause a scene?

Annie suffers from infantile anorexia, which, unlike its better-known adult version, has nothing to do with images of Kate Moss in glossy magazines. Annie rarely gets hungry, and on the few occasions her stomach tells her it's dinner time, merely bringing the food up to her mouth is enough to make her gag.

Dismissive doctors have told her mother Lisa to persuade her to eat by offering rewards - a little sticker off the fridge perhaps or maybe a new video. But Annie's food phobia appears to be far more deep-seated than that. She has never been able to adjust to the trauma of eating solids from when she was just over a year old.

It's a purely psychological problem - a mental block - that can only be tackled by intensive treatment that is not yet available in the UK because most doctors do not recognise the condition in one so young. That is why Lisa, of Normanby, in Middlesbrough, is now trying to save up the £80,000 needed for an eight-week course at a specialist centre in Baltimore, near Washington, in the US.

Without it, experts say, Annie will reach the age of six - when eating habits are ingrained for life - with little hope of a cure.

Lisa explains how Annie has survived for so long without solids. "She has a gastro tube inserted in her stomach which is attached to a drip-like machine. Every night it pumps 500 millilitres of special feed into her stomach at the rate of 50 millilitres an hour. That's enough to keep her going for the rest of the day. Apart from that she might have the occasional sip of water or juice."

If the machine is stopped, like when she was recently treated in hospital for tonsillitis, she can lose as much as eight pounds in a week. When Annie's body only weighs two stone in the first place, her reliance on the machine is obviously total.

As well as the uncomfortable nights attached to a drip, Annie faces day-to-day miseries that are unthinkable for other children. "Other children, parents and even teachers, look at Annie when she's at school and think she's a normal healthy child," says Lisa. "I'm not being horrible, but they haven't got a clue.

"She strains all day to make an effort to join in with other kids and tries to force food down her neck to appease the others. But when she gets home she is absolutely exhausted. How many four-year-olds do you know who go to bed at 5.30pm?"

Once safely home, the childhood mask of pleasing other people comes off and Annie automatically slips into her other routine. Lisa, with an admirable lack of squeamishness, describes what happens when the merest slither of solid finds its way into Annie's mouth. "If she has any food at all she will politely leave the table, walk to the bathroom, pull up the toilet seat and throw up. She doesn't cry and make a fuss. It's quite remarkable for someone so young to be so composed about something like that.

"She used to be sick so often that, at my old house, I had to put a wooden floor in the bedroom because the carpet was getting so stained. It's also taken a heavy toll on her teeth. Because so much stomach acid has washed over them, most have become rotten and dropped out. She's only got six left but, thankfully, her adult set will be coming through soon."

The drip-machine can give Annie an appetite, which, from time to time, she displays in front of strangers. She will bow to peer pressure and try and force feed herself if friends or strange adults are nearby, but it's only a front designed, in her young mind, to win friends and to appear normal.

Lisa adds: "Annie's auntie and uncle took her out for a pub meal once and ordered sausage and mashed potato. They noticed her gagging as she tried to eat. When she came home she told me to phone them to get them to promise they'd never try and feed her again. She said she had to make an effort because she didn't want to disappoint them."

Annie's condition has taken its toll on her mother who was forced to give up her job and move in with her own parents to look after her daughter properly. But it's Annie's self-esteem that has taken the biggest battering for her body's refusal to accept food.

"She tells me she doesn't love herself," explains her mother. "I've caught her using a comb to try and scrape the skin off her arm to try and harm herself. Her psychologist says she's not seeking attention - she means it."

It's not known exactly why Annie developed her eating disorder, but the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore claims to have the cure. They claim an 86 per cent success rate in curing under-eights of a condition that many British paediatricians say can't really exist.

The centre's paediatric feeding disorders programme is an intensive six to eight week treatment that aims to unlock the psychological block put on eating by the child.

Its team of psychologists, psychiatrists, dieticians and speech therapists will, if Lisa can raise the necessary funds, strive to have Annie eating three square meals a day by the end of the programme. Currently in the throes of a fund-raising drive, Lisa and her family and friends are determined to meet the costs.

She says: "It's a phenomenal amount of money to have to raise, but the consequences of not doing it are pretty bad. Doctors say if she gets to the age of six and there's still no change, her eating habits are pretty much set for life.

"If she isn't cured by the time she's 16 she will then have the legal right to refuse her feeding tube. It's that thought that spurs us on to somehow get to Baltimore."

* Lisa Jones' family would like to thank the following for their unstinting fundraising support: Middlesbrough Football Club and the Norman Conquest and Normanby pubs in Normanby.