"We were really afraid of losing our daughter": at least four families discovered a worm in Gallia milk
"It was very long, very thin, and kept moving all over the place." On November 18, 2019, Ylonna, 3 months, regurgitated a long worm "several centimeters" after drinking Galliagest 0-6 month powdered milk, remembers with franceinfo her mother, Elodie, resident of Saint-Malo (Ille- et-Vilaine). "I was scared, I was panicked," says this carer and mother of three children.
At the time, her daughter's situation was worrying: for three weeks, Ylonna hardly ate any more, and her temperature, which varied between 35 and 41°C, earned her hospitalization the night of the 3rd to November 4. The discovery of the worm speeds things up: sent to the Saint-Malo hospital by her general practitioner, Ylonna undergoes a stool analysis and an abdominal ultrasound which do not allow the discovery of other parasites. The study of the worm also concludes that it is an "adult parasite", without providing more information, according to the analysis result that franceinfo was able to consult. And the sample has since been "destroyed by the hospital", regrets Elodie.
"We were really afraid of losing our daughter," says the child's mother, her throat tight, even if no formal link can yet be established between the girl's condition and the regurgitated worm. The story ends well: "Three days after regurgitating, Ylonna started eating again naturally. Today, she is 7 months old and in good health", rejoices Elodie.
"A one and a half centimeter worm, alive and well"
Ylonna's parents nevertheless filed a complaint on Tuesday February 25 for "administration of a harmful substance to a 15-year-old minor followed by incapacity not exceeding eight days", according to the document consulted by franceinfo. "If there is a problem with Gallia milk, they have to know about it and do something about it", explains Elodie.
The story of this Breton family is not isolated. A few days later, Sunday November 23, Marine and Kevin, residents of Sort-en-Chalosse (Landes), had the unpleasant surprise of finding "a living larva" in the bottle of their 3-month-old baby, reports France Bleu Landes . The box of Gallia birth relay 0-6 months had been bought the day before in a pharmacy in a neighboring town. The couple contacted Gallia, a subsidiary of the agri-food group Danone, giving it the production number of the box – which the company confirmed to AFP – but decided not to file a complaint.
Other cases follow. On January 4, Sarah, a resident of Bormes-les-Mimosas (Var), spotted "a spider's web" in a box of Galliagest 0-6 months milk as she prepared a bottle for her 1-month-old son. "By shaking the box, I find at the bottom a worm of one and a half centimeters, very much alive", tells franceinfo this mother of two children.
"With my husband, we put the larva in a small pod and we took it to the pharmacy to have the box exchanged," she says. Contacted by franceinfo, the pharmacy confirmed the presence of a worm and indicated that it had returned the box to Gallia, at the company's request, to carry out analyses. "We tell ourselves that this kind of thing should not happen, especially since it's a big brand and a very good milk", laments Sarah. After learning of the multiplication of cases in recent weeks, the young woman says she wants to file a complaint next Monday "so that it doesn't happen again".
"I tried to keep my calm"
Because Sarah's family is not the last concerned. On the night of February 11 to 12, in La Bourboule (Puy-de-Dôme), Stéphanie discovers "a black dot of a few millimeters that moves" in a box of Galliagest 0-6 month milk while she is preparing a bottle. for her 2-month-old son Leo. "I tried to keep calm, but I immediately made the connection" with what happened to Ylonna, and which she heard about in the press. After contacting Gallia's customer service and the duty pharmacy closest to her parents' home, where she was on vacation at the time, she finally managed to get an emergency pharmacy opened to obtain infant milk and feed her son.
"In this specific case, the child does not seem to have been sick from the milk, but it is difficult to know because he suffered from bronchiolitis and therefore had a fever", indicates Stephanie's lawyer , Me Arnaud Constans, joined by franceinfo. The Auchan store in La Bourboule, in which the box of milk had been purchased, "verbally indicated that it had removed the boxes of Gallia milk from its shelves", he adds.
Stéphanie filed a complaint on February 18 at the Montrouge police station (Hauts-de-Seine), a town neighboring the one where they live, for "endangering others by a legal person", according to the document that franceinfo consulted . A complaint was also filed Friday, February 28 with the Departmental Directorate for the Protection of Populations (DDPP) of the Rhône. “What we are looking for is above all to understand what happened so that it does not happen again, and that the other families who use this product are vigilant”, indicates Stéphanie.
In addition to these four examples, another case, in Bouches-du-Rhône, was reported by RTL. But franceinfo was unable to verify this information.
Contamination outside the production chain, according to Danone
Contacted by franceinfo, Florent Lalanne, director of medical affairs at Danone, which manufactures the infant milk concerned, indicates that the company "takes this issue very, very seriously because the health of the child at the end of the chain is our primary concern".
"In the production line, all of the milk powder is never in contact with air and is packaged in a protective atmosphere where the percentage of oxygen, around 2%, is very weak, which makes it impossible for a living organism to develop," he explains. “About twenty control procedures are carried out on each product, with around a hundred criteria” before they leave the factory, he adds.
"The main thing for us is to be able to have access to the boxes so that we can carry out analyzes to understand how these larvae can become lodged in the product", also indicates Florent Lalanne, inviting the families affected to contact the company via a telephone number (0800 202 202) or the laboratory-gallia.fr website.
The two batches used by the Landes and Puy-de-Dôme families, who contacted Gallia, do not come from the same milk reference, but were produced on the same site, in Wexford (Ireland), specifies the head of medical affairs at Danone.
The "internal analyses" carried out using the batch numbers communicated by these two families "showed compliance of the production site, which strongly suggests to us contamination in the rest of the process" during transport, storage or of the distribution circuit, assures Florent Lalanne.
A similar case in 2018
However, these examples are not a first: a similar case was reported by 20 Minutes in November 2018. At the time, a family from Val-de-Marne had discovered a live larva in a box of Gallia brand milk powder after noticing that their 6-month-old daughter was suffering from stomach aches. "We are trying to understand what happened. All the other boxes of this batch produced in April 2018 have been sold. And since then we have had no other complaints," said a spokesperson at the time. from Danone.
Asked about this case, Florent Lalanne assures that "investigations have taken place" and concluded that "the conformity of the product". “We contacted the family on multiple occasions but we were unable to recover the box” and the case therefore ended there, he assures.
