Thread: Group B Strep Awareness Week 2007

Group B Strep Support is organising the UK’s second Group B Strep Awareness Week for 3-9 December 2007 – they’ll be sending packs of information and display materials to every maternity unit in the country; obtaining high profile media coverage in many magazines, journals and newspapers and ensuring celebrity TV and radio coverage.

If you’d like to help with Group B Strep Awareness Week 2007 by raising awareness or fundraising in your area, please contact them at info@gbss.org.uk and they’ll be delighted to send you some information.

GBS Petition to the Prime Minister

In conjunction with Group B Strep Support, Pregnancy & birth magazine is petitioning the Prime Minister for every woman in the UK to be offered a sensitive test for group B Streptococcus (GBS) at 35-37 weeks of pregnancy on the NHS, and for every pregnant woman to be given accurate information about GBS as a routine part of her antenatal care. If you would like to sign this petition, please visit http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/groupbstrep/.

Carrying GBS is normal - up to 30% of adults do, usually in the intestines although in women it's very common in the vagina. Carrying GBS causes no symptoms and requires no treatment. GBS can be passed to a baby around labour but usually this isn’t a problem. Sadly though, for some babies, it can be serious, causing blood poisoning, pneumonia and meningitis. However, testing women late in pregnancy - and offering antibiotics through a vein at intervals once labour has started to those whose babies are at higher risk - would prevent 80% or more of all GBS infections in newborn babies. Reliable screening is not currently available in the UK but GBSS believes it should be – which is why we’ll be presenting the Prime Minister with the petition.

Please do ask your friends and family also to sign the petition – the more names on there, the more powerful the message it sends to the Prime Minister.

And, if you’d like to ask your MP to support this campaign, that would be fantastic.

Thank you.

I'm a carrier of GBS. I must have been tested when I had my appendix removed in 1999.

I had DS in 2003, there was a mix up with my hospital notes and it wasn't npticed till after he was born that I was a carrier. This meant that he had been put at risk. He was given IV antibiotics in Special Care as a precaution while we waited for swabs to confirm that he was in the clear. It was a horrendous few days waiting. Had the hospital told me that I was a carrier in 1999 and mentioned the risk during childbirth then I could have had antibiotics in labour.

Two years ago I visited my local hospital during GBS awareness week and delivered a pack of awareness posters, leaflets, stickers, etc. The local paper came and took a pic of my two children and I.