28 December 2016

Dutch IVF centre probes suspected sperm mix-up

From the BBC, an article about a screwup in The Netherlands:

A Dutch IVF treatment centre has said that more than two dozen women may have been fertilized by sperm from the wrong man.
The Utrecht University Medical Centre said a "procedural error" between April of 2015 and November of 2016 was to blame.
Half of the couples who underwent treatment are pregnant or have already had children. They have been informed, the medical center said. "The UMC's board regrets that the couples involved had to receive this news," the center said in a statement. The statement said: "During fertilization, sperm cells from one treatment couple may have ended up with the egg cells of 26 other couples. "Therefore there's a chance that the egg cells have been fertilized by sperm other than that of the intended father." Although the chance of that happening was small, the possibility "could not be excluded," the center added. 
What went wrong?The UMC carries out between six hundred and seven hundred ICSI procedures every year The technique at the center of the mistake involved a single sperm being injected directly into a woman's egg with a pipette (photo). It is called intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), and differs from in vitro fertilization.
From April of 2015 to November of 2016, one of the lab technicians is believed to have used an inappropriate pipette to inject the sperm.
Although the pipette was changed each time, the technician used the same rubber top until he found traces of sperm in it and raised the alarm. The rubber top would normally have a filter, but in this case it did not, a hospital spokesman told the BBC.
Of the couples involved, nine have had children and four women are pregnant. The other thirteen embryos were all frozen.
All the couples are due to meet doctors from the center in the coming days, and will be offered the option of a DNA test. Dutch fertility support group Freya reacted with shock to the news. "Wanting a child is a very delicate thing, especially when it doesn't involve the normal bedroom way. So people need to have one hundred percent confidence in the method they adopt," it said.
In 2012, a mother in Singapore sued a clinic after it mixed up her husband's sperm with that of a stranger. The woman, who was ethnically Chinese, suspected something was wrong when her baby had markedly different skin tone and hair color from her Caucasian husband.
Rico says that a bad oops...

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