Yellow meconium.

Abstract

The intestinal content of newborns is known as meconium, usually described as a black-greenish slimy substance. However, in rare cases, meconium might be yellow. This is of great relevance with regard to the forensic assessment of life birth, i.e. (longer) survival time and possible (breast-)feeding before death. While in older German forensic literature, yellow meconium has been occasionally mentioned from the 19th century on - without any conclusions being drawn from this finding whether the newborn was alive or had been fed -, current forensic literature does not provide information about this phenomenon. No reports of yellow meconium were found in (older) English forensic literature as well. We report two cases of newborn autopsies with yellow meconium and provide a short overview of the respective literature.