UK infants ill after drinking contaminated baby formula of Nestle and Danone
39 points by __natty__ 6 hours ago | 10 comments

awakeasleep 2 hours ago
The article doesnt contain any detail, so if anyone else is curious:

Cereulide is a toxin produced by some strains of Bacillus cereus, a common environmental bacterium found in soil, dust, and raw agricultural materials.

Cereulide acts on cells’ mitochondria and can cause rapid-onset symptoms like vomiting, stomach cramps, and diarrhea.

During manufacturing, raw ingredients used in baby formula such as oils (e.g., arachidonic acid, or ARA oil) or dry powders can be contaminated with spores of B. cereus or pre-formed cereulide.

Because spores and the toxin survive processing, they must be prevented by testing ingredients before inclusion.

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hyperman1 2 hours ago
AFAIK this story started in France, and has been going on for a while already in multiple countries.

e.g. here is the recall in Flanders,Belgium,for 2026-01-05, so more than a month ago:

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/01/05/nestle-nan-babyvoedi...

Here is one English source about the deaths in France:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nestl...

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greatgib 50 minutes ago
Long running story already. What the report doesn't say is that it looks like that affected product batches were manufactured or manufactured with ingredients coming from China.

It is a shame for Nestle to have to import ingredients from China for such simple products anyway. It's the greed at topest level.

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bn-l 45 minutes ago
I try to boycott them as much as possible. I thought the boycott nestle thing was just a weird Reddit thing until actually reading about this company. It’s pretty sickening.
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jzemeocala 33 minutes ago
Didn't this happen once before with nestle baby formula in Africa years/decades ago?
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graemep 7 minutes ago
IIRC that was deceptive marketing. It was something like selling non-formula as formula, or selling formula as better for babies than breastmilk.
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KellyCriterion 2 hours ago
God thanks, there is already a large withdrawal action happening, initiated a few days ago: Im always wondering why it takes them so long to find out and inform the public?
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dvfjsdhgfv 41 minutes ago
Where I leave we were informed about the scandal after the products had been replaced. Makes me wonder what the priorities are.
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metalman 32 minutes ago
ok then, just try and report ANYTHING directly to ANY mega corp and lets say you happen to finnaly get through to a human at that company, and they then try to push it up, while you are listening, and hear them bieng completly unable to do anything from within the company from there lowly level. It is an almost absolute guarantee that the top levels will not be required to be involved in this in any way, as this will be relegated to trumpeters and sin eaters, hired for just such occasions by there staff.
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cucumber3732842 35 minutes ago
>Im always wondering why it takes them so long to find out and inform the public?

Problems with babies diets are hard to identify generally. Frankly I'm amazed this was identified with only 36 sick infants.

Consumers of baby formula are known for having a high baseline rate of spewing things out their holes and having a pretty high standard deviation on top of that rate. And of course the babies are getting older all this time and changing their diets and responses to things. So a large subset of parents are just gonna write it off as "I guess now that my baby is X months old this brand of formula gives him the shits/upsets their stomach." There's also likely confounding changes. And it's not like they can tell you "hey this tastes different than last week's". It's gonna take a while to ID that there's a problem and then actually correlate it to anything (consumption of a specific problem product in this case).

It's not like the kids are turning blue or some other "obviously not right" symptom. That'd be identified and root caused within the week of the first case.

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NedF 2 hours ago
[dead]
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