French food giant Danone said Friday it is asking parents to alert the company if they find any worm larvae in packages of its Gallia powdered baby milk, after a couple reported that their three-month-old had regurgitated a parasitic worm.
"We need to recover these packages to carry out further analyses," Florent Lalanne, head of medical affairs at Danone's Bledina baby food unit, told AFP.
Authorities confirmed this week that a couple in Brittany, western France, had filed a complaint against Danone after their baby, fed with Gallia, threw up a six-centimetre (2.5 inch) worm last November.
Two other cases have since been reported to Danone, Lalanne said, "and we've learned of three other cases from press reports." He said the two packages examined by Danone were both produced at a site in Wexford, Ireland.
"Throughout the production line the powdered milk never comes into contact with air, and is packaged in a controlled environment where the oxygen level is around two per cent, which makes survival of a living organism impossible," Lalanne said.
He said the larvae might have contaminated the milk "outside the production site, during transport or storage, or in the distribution network.