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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She was later swabbed and told it was GBS.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“I was a first-time mum, wanting to have as much of a natural labour as I could.”<\/p>\n
She said having IV antibiotics was not what she wanted, but added it “was the safest option”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five years ago, first-time mum Menna Hulme had to be given antibiotics intravenously during labour to make sure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":792575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-792574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/792575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}