Five years ago, first-time mum Menna Hulme had to be given antibiotics intravenously during labour to make sure she and her baby were safe.
She was found to have Group B Streptococcus (GBS) in her pregnancy, an infection that affects one in 1,750 babies in the UK and kills one a week.
While expecting her third child, Hulme became the first woman in Europe to sign up to a vaccine trial, run by Prof Will Parry-Smith from Keele University, in an attempt to mitigate the effects of GBS.
Hulme, from English Frankton, in north Shropshire, said she hoped that, following her own experience, the trial would lead to a widely available vaccine to help fight the bacteria in childbirth.
Babies can contract GBS from the mother by ingesting the bacteria as they pass through the birth canal, and IV antibiotics are used to combat that.
When pregnant with her first child, Hulme said she did not know what GBS was, but small traces were flagged during a urine test at her first midwife appointment.
She was later swabbed and told it was GBS.
“There is no routine screening for it as such. From my experiences it was just by chance that it was picked up with our first pregnancy very early,” she said.
“I was a first-time mum, wanting to have as much of a natural labour as I could.”
She said having IV antibiotics was not what she wanted, but added it “was the safest option”.