"In 2005, a twelve-day-old baby named Tariq Jamieson died in Canada. The coroner found no anatomical cause of death-no physical reason he should've died. But a blood sample taken at his autopsy, and later tested, determined that the baby had died of codeine-and-morphine poisoning. Jamieson's mother had been prescribed Tylenol No. 3, which includes codeine, after a difficult childbirth. The body can metabolize some codeine into morphine."
"The coroner's office asked one of the country's leading pediatricians and toxicologists, Gideon Koren, to look at the case. Koren concluded that Jamieson had died after ingesting morphine through his mother's breast milk-according to Koren, it was the first reported death-by-breast-milk case in history. He and a team of researchers later published a paper about the case in The Lancet, a prestigious international medical journal."
In 2005 a twelve-day-old infant, Tariq Jamieson, died in Canada with no anatomical cause of death. Autopsy blood tests found codeine and morphine, and the infant's mother had been prescribed Tylenol No. 3. Gideon Koren concluded that morphine passed through breast milk caused the death and published a Lancet paper arguing that some mothers with a genetic predisposition can metabolize codeine into high morphine levels in breast milk. Regulators in North America and Europe revised breastfeeding guidance and clinicians shifted to prescribing other opioids. Later research raised doubts about the breast-milk explanation and suggested direct administration of medication to the infant. Estimates suggest millions of infants may have been affected by the resulting global changes.
Read at The New Yorker
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