Asda forced to apologise after own-brand pregnancy tests give woman false results four times

Asda has been forced to apologise to customers after their own-brand pregnancy test gave a woman four false positives.

Michaela, 25, had been trying to conceive with her partner for a few weeks, and was surprised when Asda's own-brand pregnancy tests came back positive.

After getting two positives from Asda’s tests, Michaela took two Clearblue pregnancy tests, and both turned out negative. She tried two Asda tests again, which both came back positive, and two more Clearblue ones, which came up as negative.

After getting four positives, Michaela had to wait a week to see a midwife who told her false positives are extremely rare and that there was no point doing a blood test to confirm the pregnancy. She only found out she was indeed not expecting when she went for her first scan.

Speaking to Plymouth Live, she said: 'My mind was all over the place. I called the doctors and made a midwife appointment. I didn't really know what was happening.

'I had to wait a week to see the midwife and when I did she said getting a false positive was extremely rare and that there was no point in testing my blood.'

Speaking about the moment she found out she was not pregnant, she said: 'It's so embarrassing it's happened, and I don't want it to happen to other women.'

Responding to Michaela's story and other customers' claims that their tests are not accurate, a spokesperson for Asda said in a statement: 'We're really sorry to hear [Michaela] feels she had a bad experience with us.

'We want our customers to trust our products and ensure all our pregnancy test comply with strict legislation and all batches are quality tested. We will not be issuing a recall on this product.'

Condom

Credit: REX/Shutterstock

The controversy around Asda's pregnancy tests comes after Durex issued a recall warning for some of their products, over concerns that the affected batches - with expiry dates between Dec. 2020 and Feb. 2021 - could split.

The said in a statement: 'We recently found that a limited number of the above condoms made earlier this year are not passing our stringent shelf-life durability tests.

'Our tests have shown that some batches which are currently on the market in UK & Ireland do not pass the requirements for burst pressure towards the end of the shelf life for the product.

'Only for the batches of condoms affected by this issue, there could be an increase in the number of condoms that burst during application or use.'

Mariana Cerqueira
Lifestyle Editor

Mariana is a lifestyle writer who has written for Goodto.com and My Imperfect Life. She joined the Goodto.com team as an intern after completing her journalism MA at City University. After six months spent writing about food, celebrity news, and family trends, Mariana left to write for Healthy Food magazine - but returned in 2017, to join the Future team once again. In her spare time, you’ll find Mariana in the kitchen cooking for her friends.