The horrible find.
A young couple, Rachael Stott, 26, and her husband Adam, 31, from Stockport, Manchester, kept cleaning their home after finding insects on their son Leo, just days after bringing him home from the hospital.
They put all of the bedding on hot washes, bought tons of bug sprays and kept checking the house for infestations, yet more and more bugs would appear.
Bugs in the crib.
Rachel told her aunt about this, and she suggested they checked the baby’s wicker basket. Rachel did exactly that, banging the wicker crib onto a plastic bag, She was stunned when hundreds of bugs came tumbling out.
Rachael said: ‘I felt sick to my stomach when I saw all of the living bugs falling out of the basket – the same basket that Leo had been sleeping in.
Bugs under the baby.
‘I could not believe that he had been sleeping so close to them all this time. I hate thinking of all of these bugs under him and I had not known. ‘It is awful. It had made me feel like I couldn’t protect him but all of this time it was something that had come in with the basket that was supposed to keep him safe. I felt very let down.’, Rachel added.
Bed bugs.
Rachael had bought the wicker basket from Tesco Direct before Leo was born and had kept it in its packaging. Then, two months ago, the couple went home with baby Leo.They started noticing bugs in the area within days of getting him home.
Rachael said: ‘I had no idea where they were coming from. I felt almost at my wit’s end with the stress of it all. We had cleaned everything so much I felt I was going out of my mind.
Then she said, ‘In the end I was in floods of tears and felt like I was having a breakdown when I called my auntie and she asked if I had anything wicker. She suggested I bang it over some plastic sheets to see.’
She added: ‘I didn’t think anything was going to happen as we had bought it brand new, so when I banged it, I did it indoors next to the patio doors.
These bugs feed on blood.
‘All of the bugs fell out, it was disgusting. I was frantically scrabbling round trying to get the doors open so I could get them out. They were horrible looking, I didn’t know what they were but they were about the size of an ant.
‘At first I felt relief that I had found out what it was. But then I was really, really angry that this could have happened.
‘Leo is only two months old and has been around these bugs since he was a couple of days old. That is horrible to think about.’
A crib and a toy.
She complained to Tesco, and they sent a person to retrieve the basket.
A Tesco spokesperson said: ‘We have very high standards for the safety and quality of our products so we were concerned to hear of this incident.
‘We have been in touch with Mrs Stott to apologise and have arranged to collect the product from her house. We will also provide her with a replacement crib and send her little boy a toy as a gesture of goodwill.’