A MOTHER-of-two with a rare food allergy could have died after a supermarket blunder resulted in her eating a frozen meal containing mushrooms.
Bosses at Asda today apologised over the labelling error, which prompted them to withdraw the product from shelves across the country.
Now Catherine Shackleton's husband Neil, from Great Harwood, is demanding compensation because the product, an Asda-brand lasagne bought from the Accrington store, was not properly labelled.
Neil, 27, said: "I'd gone out fishing one night with a friend and Catherine, who is severely allergic to mushrooms, was alone looking after our two boys Matthew and Dominic.
"We sometimes buy ready meals because we don't always have time to cook when we're busy looking after the kids.
"We always check the ingredients and we thought we were safe with these lasagnes because they didn't have mushrooms in the list of ingredients.
Catherine, 29, said: "I started to eat one and about half-way through my throat started to burn and my tongue started to burn and I began to have difficulty breathing because my throat swelled up.
"It's very frightening."
She managed to contact a friend who contacted Neil.
He came home and called an emergency doctor who gave her an anti-allergy injection to stop her throat from closing.
When they checked the meal after the incident in May, they found large pieces of mushroom in it but nothing on the label.
Catherine now has to carry a small syringe of anti-allergy drugs whenever they eat out because she cannot trust the ingredients.
Neil said: "Mushrooms can kill her if she does not get treatment in time -- this time we were lucky."
The couple, who live in Moss Street and have two sons Matthew, three, and Dominic, 18 months, contacted Lancashire trading standard officers.
They took a sample of the meal and bought two more from the Accrington store for laboratory tests.
They agreed the labelling was wrong but Neil said they contacted them on Friday to say they will not be prosecuting.
A spokeswoman for Asda said the firm recognised mushroom allergy as a condition.
She said they had investigated and discovered there was a mistake with the packaging on the lasagne.
She said the product recipe had been changed around the time Mrs Shackleton bought the meal but a mistake at the suppliers had seen some put into the old packaging.
She said: "We would like to apologise to Mrs Shackleton for the error.
"We regularly revisit product and update them but in this case a new product went into old packaging.
"When we heard about the mistake we immediately withdrew all of the meals from shelves."
She said when Asda received official word from trading standards that their investigation was formally over they would be happy to speak to the Shackleton family about compensation.
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