Baby born with no blood ‘a miracle'

London: Smiling, healthy and six months old, Olivia Norton is understandably the apple of her mother's eye.

Yet when she was born, doctors were stunned by her ‘snow-white' appearance — because she had no blood in her body.

A rare condition meant her blood had run directly back into her mother's circulatory system.

The newborn had such a low count of haemoglobin that it could not officially be classed as blood.

She was given less than two hours to live but survived thanks to emergency transfusions which transformed her skin to pink.

Yesterday, her mother told of her shock at a condition so unusual that it will be written into medical text books. "Olivia was my first baby, so I didn't really know what to expect — but I certainly didn't think she'd be that colour," 31-year-old Louise Bearman, a barrister's clerk, said.

Bearman said she and her partner Paul Norton, 36, noticed Olivia had abruptly stopped kicking six weeks before she was due to be born.

After three days without movement, they went to Broomfield Hospital where doctors ordered an emergency caesarean. The infant had blood haemoglobin levels of only three, compared with a normal 18. She was given two transfusions.

Neo-natal nurse Sharon Pilgrim said she had never heard of such low haemoglobin levels. "It was a miracle Olivia survived. She was incredibly pale and had difficulties breathing.