Courtney Akin, 30, started buying convenient applesauce pouches for her son, Jaxson, in July 2023. It wasn’t until September, at his 12-month checkup, that she got her first hint that something might be off.
“We’d been purchasing (the pouches) for a while,” Akin told NBC News this week. The snacks, sold by brand WanaBana, seemed healthy and were marketed as gluten-free, preservative-free and with no sugar added, recalled Akin, who lives in Folkston, Georgia.
Plus, her son “loved them,” she said.
But routine tests at that 12-month checkup revealed Jaxson had a worrying amount of lead in his blood. At first, the results were confusing. “He’s 1 year old at the time, and he goes to day care,” Akin said. “So he’s not grabbing his tool belt and, you know, going mining every day.”
However, follow-up testing confirmed that Jaxson had 5.2 micrograms of lead per deciliter in his blood. While there’s no safe blood level of lead for children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consider a child with 3.5 micrograms per deciliter or above to have more lead in their blood than most.
When the pouches were recalled in October for possible lead contamination, Jaxson’s test results finally started to make more sense, Akin said.
A family member sent her a screenshot of a news report about the applesauce pouch recall. Just a few days earlier, she’d purchased more at Dollar Tree and had the apple cinnamon flavor sitting on her counter. (A spokesperson for Dollar Tree has previously said the retailer has since removed the product from its shelves and locked registers to prevent sales.)
After that, Akin stopped giving him the pouches. And, over the next few months, “Lo and behold, his levels went back to normal,” she said.
Still, Akin, who breastfed her son for 13 months, felt guilty.
“Working as hard as I did nursing that long, and then I go and purchase lead pouches. … I feel terrible that I fed that to my son,” she said.
By November 2023, the Food and Drug…
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