TV star Amanda Holden’s daughter Lexi was admitted to hospital with life-threatening E.coli — one of the first to be struck down in the latest outbreak. Lexi , 18 — sitting her A-levels at the time — was on a ward for five days with Amanda and husband Chris at her bedside.
Here, Amanda warns others about the ongoing outbreak...
For about three weeks, Lexi had been complaining of bloating and stomach cramps. She was not happy at all and in quite a lot of pain with her tummy. It was around the time of revision and her A-levels, so I was just putting this down to exam stress.
Eventually I took her to the GP — who was beyond brilliant — and they insisted on taking blood samples and stool samples too. Within a few days, the results came back as a bacterial infection . From here the cultures were sent off to where they would be grown to determine what bacteria it was and what antibiotics to put her on.
Meanwhile, I was in Spain filming and began getting calls from various government officials because we had to fill out various forms about what and where she might have eaten, what kind of food we had in the house, etc. But we were still clueless as to what this thing could actually be or where it had come from. The cultures came back saying it was VTEC E.
Coli, a very harmful strain of bacteria that’s very rare in humans. At this point, there’d been nothing on the news about this and so we could not work out how it had happened. Our doctor was asking if we lived on a .