Baby girl screened for HIV after TWICE being given another mother's breast milk at hospital

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Last updated at 1:31 PM on 23rd December 2010

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A couple have spoken of their horror today after their baby girl was twice given breast milk from strangers.

Zene Yates was tested for diseases including HIV and hepatitis when she was two-weeks-old as these can be passed from mothers to babies through breast milk.

Thankfully Zene tested negative but her mother Sarah, 25, said she and her husband Phil were 'devastated' at the thought of what diseases she could have been given.

Baby Zene Yates pictured a few weeks after birth. She was twice given breast milk from strangers after hospital errors. She thankfully tested negative for conditions including HIV

'It would have been a nightmare,' she said.

Zene, who had been born eight weeks early, was first fed the wrong milk when an incorrect feeding tube was attached to her special care cot by a nurse at Lewisham Hospital.

 

She was then sent home with a bottle of milk expressed from a different mother.

Mr Yates, 28, who is a web developer, said he was appalled by the errors and wants stricter checks at NHS maternity units.

He told the Evening Standard his daughter had 'twice unnecessarily been exposed to potential disease through someone else's breast milk. Something clearly has to change.'

Relief: Sara and Phil Yates had an anxious wait after their daughter Zene was given milk that could potentially have been contaminated

Zene, now seven months old, was born in May. 

She had been in the unit for two weeks when a consultant told Mrs Yates that a bottle of another mother’s breast milk had been connected to the incubator feeding tube. 

Nurses fed Zene 20ml of the milk before realising the error but managed to extract 10ml back out. The other mother later tested negative for HIV and hepatitis.

The second error was not discovered until several weeks after their daughter was released, when Mrs Yates was defrosting milk they had been given to take home. 

Breast milk is known to transmit HIV and other diseases such as chicken pox and tuberculosis, and infected mothers are advised to breast feed only if they are receiving treatment. Although infection risk is low, it cannot be ruled out.

Pregnant mothers are screened for infection but doctors could not confirm that the two mothers were clear by the time their milk was given to two-week-old Zene.

Sue Jacobs, a breastfeeding expert at the Royal College of Midwives, said the incident in Lewisham Hospital’s neo-natal unit was ‘very serious'. 

She added: 'Milk should be screened, stored in the correct conditions and checked multiple times before being dispensed. Policies and procedures should definitely by re-examined in order to stop something like this from happening again.'

The nurse involved in the first mix-up at Lewisham Hospital has been disciplined for not checking with a colleague that the right breast milk was being used.

In the second incident, the hospital said the ward matron had inadvertently taken a wrong bottle from the freezer used to store milk.

In a letter to Mr and Mrs Yates, the hospital said it was ‘truly sorry’ for the mistakes and that its procedures for expressed breast milk were 'not as robust as we thought they were'.

A spokesman said: 'We have apologised to Mr and Mrs Yates, and made improvements to how we store and manage breast milk in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to reduce the risk of this happening again.’

A working party has been set up to examine the issue and staff reminded of their responsibilities.

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