Dear Mums.
Camphor is honestly linked to jaundice in babies. Mentholatum too is linked to jaundice because it contains camphor. Especially baby boys says my Doctor. I knew this years back after my son got really sick a few days after birth and I never suspect the camphor in my drawers was dangerous. After the Doctor’s lecture while on admission in the ICU, we got home., I cleaned every cupboard and threw the camphor balls away. Threw away his bottle of mentholatum too.
Up till now, when my son sits around anyone with camphor smells, he immediately begins to have a dry cough that won’t stop until you take him away from there.
When we got home from the hospital, I published a post on how to give bath to newborn baby the Nigerian way. On that post I revealed that The Doctors advised we don’t use camphor around the newborn.
How Camphor and mentholatum made my son really sick after birth
After we got discharged from the hospitals and his yellowish jaundice eyes cleared, I quickly shared here on the blog and warned parents to desist from using camphor. No camphor in the house, not in baby’s clothes or any box or cupboards. The rate at which babies get sick with jaundice these days is alarming. Visit hospitals and you know that even getting beds to admit jaundice babies is hard as jaundiced babies come in daily.
Up till now, I still feel like my baby wouldn’t have had that much bilirubin in his system if we didn’t keep camphor in the house. Some mums don’t believe it but here is a Doctor tweeting a warning to mothers that Camphor 9is linked to jaundice in new babies.
According to Dr. Chinonso Aproko , “If you have a newborn baby, avoid camphor around them and even on their clothes Camphor or naphthalene is linked to jaundice in new babies Jaundice is yellow coloration of their skin and eyes because of overproduction of bilirubin Bilirubin is poisonous to the brain of a child.”
When asked if it is safe to use mentholatum on babies, seeing as they contain camphor, he said it’s safer to wrap the baby up than to use mentholatum on a baby.
“There is nothing like baby mentholatum I know they wrote it on the container But mentholatum has been linked to jaundice in babies, and the excess bilirubin that causes jaundice can cause life long damage to a baby’s brain. If a baby is cold, wrap them, don’t use mentholatum,” he wrote.
Avoid using mentholatum to keep your newborn warm. The camphor in mentholatum isn’t safe for them. If you have experienced jaundice in a newborn, you’ll know. In my son’s case, the jaundice wasn’t detected on time until bilirubin levels were so high the Doctors informed us they might do a ‘blood change’ for him and that got me really scared. How a newborn baby’s blood will get drained out and replaced with another blood.