Yorkshire mum hits out at health officials who "lost" e.coli results - forcing family into 3 week lockdown

Lyra McManus, one, tested positive for the disease, which causes stomach pain and diarrhoea and can be serious, in December last year along with other children at her nursery, which was closed down while the outbreak was managed.

On January 11, her parents Richard and Rosie were told they also had to be tested along with their other daughter Ivy, 4, and in the mean time quarantine from family, friends and work while waiting for the results.

But just over a fortnight later on January 27, they were told by experts at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) that the test samples hadn’t been received, despite Mrs McManus sending them in a priority postbox and regularly contacting a consultant to check on their status.

The delay meant an extension to the quarantine, which kept the couple away from work as NHS speech and language therapists, and meant their older daughter missed almost two weeks of school and Lyra missed over a month of nursery - which was still being paid for.

The family were finally given the all-clear earlier this week - but Mr McManus only found out he was e.coli negative when nursery staff rang him with the confidential health results.

Lyra has now recovered from the infection while the rest of the family all tested negative.

Mrs McManus said: “The consultant explained that there was only one lab in the country that could process the samples, so part of it was they didn’t have the capacity to deal with it.

“It feels like they’ve been making it up as they’ve gone along.

“They’ve taken so long and been so slow, and all they’ve done is negatively affected a lot of people.

“I was really cross that they told nursery Richard’s results. It’s a confidentiality breach, those results could have said anything and it’s not for the nursery to know that either way.”

“Ivy has been so upset by it. She’s quite anxious about school anyway, and I think she’s found it really hard.”

Dr Mike Gent, regional deputy director, UKHSA, said: “We have been in touch with Mrs McManus to apologise for problems with both communicating and processing testing results.

“ As this was an outbreak in a vulnerable setting control of the outbreak and prevention of spread has been the primary objective of the multi-agency outbreak control team.

"We are glad this appears to have been successful, although numerous challenges have been experienced in collecting, processing and reporting laboratory specimens to support the necessary interventions. Because of these problems, we have been developing a new way of dealing with samples aimed at preventing this happening again.”