OriginalSunshine

Hi folks,

my darling little boy (6 months) is severely allergic to mum's milk and cow's milk

He's currently doing ok (not great, but ok) on soy formula & some mum's milk.

However, we're off to Oz in a couple of weeks time for a much needed holiday & need to bring his formula along.

What do I do at the customs/immigration about this, as it is a food product?

Any help?

OS

CHnJ

Sealed cans are fine with customs, as are the bottles that are made up for the flight. If you tell me what brand you use, I can tell you if we get it here. We use Nan HA for similar reasons.

Craig&Sam

Yes, sealed cans are fine. I think you have to declare it at Aus customs, we did anyway and it was no problem. Plus the fact the queue at the goods to declare channel was alot smaller . Just a small tip if it is not already obvious, dont make up your bottles before the flight, take the small unopened ready made cartons and use them one by one when you need them. First time we flew with the baby we made up bottles using the SMA powder and stood them upright in our hand luggage.....they leaked everywhere, and stunk to high heaven after a coupled of hours. Good luck.

CHnJ

I totally agree. You'll also miss the little cartons as you can't get them over here, even if you can get them for your brand in the UK. Another idea is to fill the bottles with preboiled water and add premeasured amounts of formula to them as you need them. Don't do what we did once (oh ok then, twice) which was to pack the change bag in the buggy which goes in the hold! We got stopped at customs as the resultant wee-filled clothes in the bag tripped a bomb-chemical sensor.

OriginalSunshine

oops! :scared:


we've tried him on Nan HA & also on Isomil. We're actually based in Borneo at the moment, and cant get pre-made cartons, only powdered. These are the only two brands he can tolerate and even then the Nan HA is a bit dodgy - he went into anaphylatctic shock when he had 4oz of Enfacol A+ formula! :scared:

CHnJ

You can certainly get Nan HA here, I don't recognise the Isomil but a quick Google shows you can buy it online for about A$18 a tin. Queensland gets a bit of a slating for the way it handles allergies - and there are only a couple of specialists in the state - but we've found that even when there are no policies in place, people are interested and willing for you to train them in what they need to know. There's been quite a bit of media coverage about it lately and other states seem to fair better than Queensland.

OriginalSunshine

?! well we're off to Perth for two weeks so buying online and/or Queensland wont be much help ?!

CHnJ

That'll teach me to read posts properly! : )

If you don't mind losing a big chunk of your weight allowance, then as has been said, there should be no problem with you bringing in sealed tins; just remember to go through the red channel.

OriginalSunshine

ok

flip

No problem with sealed cartons. I made powder milk up on the plane - just asked the staff to rinse the bottles with boiling water and refill and then made it up as we went. Had to ditch the remaining formula but was allowed to bring in full cartons.

I also contacted Cow and Gate to ask what was same product over here. They did the research for me and the darlings were happy with their replacement.

rpa34

My daughter has dairy allergies & is on Cow & Gate "Pepti" formula. We have now a few tins of the stuff which I know we wont get through before we leave here. Do you think we can ship it and declare it? again, its all in sealed tins. ???

YFitz

My son also had severe allergy. He was on Pepti-Junior which we got on prescription. A month or so before we left, the paediatric dietician we were under wrote a detailed letter of his history so that when we arrived in Aus we could take the letter to a GP here and save us waffling on. The dietician also wrote a letter to our GP in the UK and asked him to precribe a double repeat prescription (we used to get 8 tins per prescription so this allowed us to get 16 tins just before we left) On arrival here we therefore had loads of milk for him and didn't have to rush off to a GP to get him sorted out. The new GP read the letter, phoned for authorisation and gave us a repeat prescription here also.
Yvonne
HTH

rpa34

How did you get it all to Perth? We have 5 x 950gm tins here at the moment and want to include it in the container. Do you think we could? declaring it of course....

YFitz

Doubt there will be any problem bringing it in the container but you will need to check. We brought ours in our luggage. Us 2 adults and 2 children had a double baggage allowance so we had 4* 40kg and the bubs got 10kg I think, plus we got an extra allowance on our hand luggage. Can't remember the exact amount but our allowance was somewhere in the region of 200kg We spread the tins of formula around the 33(!) pieces of luggage we had just incase some went missing.
It was all straight forward really. Honest

rpa34

you were so lucky. we are oneway with Malaysian, so we get 20kgs each adult & only 10kgs for child. doesnt add up to much when you are immigrating thats for sure...
I did email Australian customs 2 weeks ago but they never bothered to respond.