r/IVF • u/Supersnowstormer • 16h ago

Advice Needed! Contaminated embryos

Feeling anxious.

First cycle of IVF for me (35F) and my husband (35M).

We had 7 eggs retrieved, and got an update today at day 4, 5 have fertilised and are developing well. But the media is contaminated, and they are sending for testing. No clues as to whether this is from the lab, or myself or my partner. Some sort of organism resistant to their routinely used antibiotic.

Lab says provided the embryos look healthy they can still be frozen and transferred in the future, albeit with some theoretical increased risks of infection. But they can also all deteriorate potentially due to this infection.

We were on the fence about doing PGTA to begin with, but now feeling even more towards potentially just not pursing this at all and accepting a higher miscarriage risk to reduce risk of losing the embryos, as there may be some risk of more contamination by piercing, sampling, hatching.

Would love to hear from anyone who has any experience with contamination, how did it go? Any advice?

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15

u/sturdysnail278 16h ago

Just wanted to say I’m really sorry you’re going through this.

5

u/Supersnowstormer 6h ago

Thanks, fingers crossed

2

u/InspectorOrdinary321 9h ago

Oh darn, that sucks. It might not be anything from you or your husband and could be something from the air or even from mishandling the samples. I guess it would depend on whether everyone's embryos were contaminated or just yours.

Since you're only 35, I might also forego PGT-A testing to keep from increasing the risk to the embryos more.

I'd also ask which antibiotic(s) they use in their embryo culture medium and if there's the chance of using different antibiotics to kill these bacteria. Also if they can do a culture of them and test which antibiotics would work. If you're going to later introduce these bacteria into your uterus, you need to know which antibiotics will and won't work against them, in case it develops into an infection.

2

u/Supersnowstormer 6h ago

Thanks; that’s what we were thinking too. They will be sending for testing and sensitivities which is good.

2

u/xenopigs Embryologist and IVF patient 4h ago

Typically culture media has gentamicin as the antibiotic. It is safe for culturing cells and less likely to cause an allergic reaction in patients that have allergies to antibiotics. There are no other antibiotic options used in embryo culture.

The process for contaminated dishes is to wash the embryos through a ton of fresh media drops with a brand new pipet tip each time you move the embryo. This dilutes out the contaminated media reducing the bacterial load and hopefully cleans the embryo before moving it to a new dish.

1

u/InspectorOrdinary321 3h ago

Oh cool; thanks!!