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A two-month-old baby has tragically died after she suffered alcohol intoxication during breastfeeding.
Reports have revealed that baby Sapphire died with an alcohol level in her body reading more than six times the legal blood alcohol limit for an adult driver.
Sapphire Williams and her twin sister, Honey, were born premature at 33 weeks gestation on November 4, 2016.
But less than two months later, on January 1, 2017, Sapphire’s tiny body was found unresponsive on her parents bed.
Her mother, Janice Tua, had been at her cousin’s house the day before where she drank 18 cans of bourbon and cola.
The following morning at 1am, Sapphire woke for a feed. While waiting for a bottle of formula to cool, Tua gave her daughter some breastmilk.
Then when Honey woke, Tua placed Sapphire on the bed to tend to her sister. When she returned, she noticed blood was coming from her baby’s nose.
Tua’s husband had performed CPR but Sapphire could not be revived.
A toxicology report presented to the coroner indicated that the amount of alcohol found in the blood from Sapphire’s heart was 308 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood – six times the legal limit for drivers in Australia.
Coroner Debra Bell has stressed the importance that breastfeeding mothers should not consume alcohol at any stage.
‘Unfortunately, [Sapphire’s] mother chose to drink a large quantity of alcohol and subsequently at a later stage chose to breastfeed her,’ she said.
However, a post-mortem examination carried out after the death revealed that while there was alcohol in the baby’s heart and liver, there was none found in her stomach.
The pathologist responsible has admitted that while he was uncertain about the cause of death, contributing factors include acute alcohol intoxication, dangerous sleeping environment, prematurity, possible septicaemia and suffocation.
Police have stated that there were no untoward of suspicious circumstances surrounding the death.
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