Mother's breast milk leaves daughter fighting for her life

When she brought her healthy 7lb 8oz daughter Dorothy home from hospital 24 hours after giving birth, she soon settled into a breast-feeding routine.

Everything seemed fine - until the ninth day, when the little girl fell into a deep sleep from which she could not be roused.

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Frantic with worry, her 36-year-old mother took her to accident and emergency where doctors fought to save her as her condition deteriorated.

But it took ten doctors in three hospitals a further six days to diagnose that she had a potentially lethal allergy - to her mother's milk.

Dorothy had galactosaemia, an extremely rare condition causing a violent adverse reaction to lactose, which affects just one in 45,000 babies in Britain.

Instead of helping her grow strong, her mother's milk had been poisoning her, causing her liver to fail.

Miss Cooper and her partner Murray Allan, a 34-year- old web designer, from Charlton, South-East London, first realised something was wrong shortly after the birth in May when Dorothy failed to wake up after nine hours of sleep.

Miss Cooper, the head of an advertising agency, said: 'I thought, "My God, she's slept through the night", but that's not possible at such a young age.

'I turned to Murray who had the same anxious expression on his face, and we rushed to her cot to make sure she was all right. For a split second you think, has she died?'

After Dorothy failed to come round, her parents rang the emergency midwife who advised them to go to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich. There, doctors found Dorothy's blood sugar was dangerously low, but initially they thought she had not been feeding enough.

The infant was transferred to a surgical unit at Farnborough where she had so many blood tests taken that her veins collapsed.

After 48 hours, the family were moved to a specialist liver unit at King's College Hospital when her liver started to fail.

Finally, after being seen by a further five doctors and losing 14 per cent of her body weight, the problem was spotted and Dorothy was placed on lactose-free bottle milk.

Now a month on, Miss Cooper and her partner have been able to take their seven-week-old daughter home after she made a full recovery. She is being fed a soya-based milk free from lactose.

Miss Cooper said: 'I'll never be able to have the closeness of breast feeding again, but having willed her to get better and seeing how she put up such a battle, I know we'll be OK.

'It's a horrible thought, but I was actually poisoning Dorothy with my own breastmilk.'

Those with galactosaemia lack a vital enzyme to absorb galactose sugar from milk, so it accumulates in their blood. If the condition is left undetected, it can lead to brain damage, blindness and death through liver failure.

The incurable genetic disorder can also cause speech and learning difficulties and infertility as it affects the production of the hormone oestrogen.