New Jersey officials say Brandon is at least the second baby whose critical heart defect was detected by the test, an infant-size version of the pulse oximetry screening commonly done on adult patients. The other "save" took place in September, at Newton Medical Center in Sussex County.
New Jersey's is the first such law in the country. A few states have followed suit, while other such measures are under consideration, including in Pennsylvania. U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has recommended that all newborns receive "pulse ox," which costs just a few dollars and takes minutes.
Mamadou and Lorretta Diallo, Brandon's parents, were by his side in the middle of the night when a nurse came to get the baby for the test.
When he didn't return soon, Lorretta Diallo started to worry and asked her husband to go check. "I didn't know what was going on," she said.
Nurses were so surprised by Brandon's oxygen level - it was 40 percent saturation, whereas normal readings are in the 90s - that they did the test again. The result was the same, and he was immediately intubated and soon on the helicopter to Children's Hospital. An echocardiogram revealed that the two large arteries carrying blood from his heart were transposed.
As a result, the "blue" blood that was sent to his heart from various parts of the body for oxygenation was not sent on to the lungs. Instead, it was simply returned straight back to the body, said Aaron Dorfman, a pediatric cardiologist at Children's Specialty Care Center in Voorhees, where Brandon has been for a checkup.
The little blood that was oxygenated by his lungs, meanwhile, was sent back to the lungs, over and over in a grim cycle. This defect occurs a few dozen times per 100,000 live births, Dorfman said.
