For 40 years American hospitals fed premature babies soybean oil through a vein, and when a pharmacist found the fix, it took the regulator 14 years to approve it. A baby born with a damaged gut cannot be fed by mouth. He is kept alive on a drip that carries his entire diet. The fat in that drip, in every American hospital, was an emulsion of soybean oil. Many of those babies developed liver failure. It was the known price of the treatment. The options were to stop the drip, or to put a newborn on the transplant list. In 2004 a baby called Charlie was dying of it at Boston Children's Hospital. A pharmacist, Kathleen Gura, and a surgeon, Mark Puder, got permission to import a European product in which the fat came from fish. His liver recovered. So did the next baby's, and the one after. The hospital had been losing several children a year to death or transplant. It dropped to 1 transplant in 6 years. The fish emulsion was not approved in America. Each child needed a separate application, and for years the families or the hospital paid for it themselves. Approval finally came on 27 July 2018. Nobody had given those babies anything poisonous by the standards of the day. They had been given the national dietary advice, intravenously, with nothing else to dilute it.For 40 years American hospitals fed premature babies soybean oil through a vein, and when a pharmacist found the fix, it took the regulator 14 years to approve it.
— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) October 2, 2026
A baby born with a damaged gut cannot be fed by mouth. He is kept alive on a drip that carries his entire diet. The… pic.twitter.com/tAecxi0Y57
Soybean oil is still the standard fat in an adult drip.
