I mean human breast milk, is there a place where mothers can buy it if they can’t produce it themselves?
I believe breast milk is occasionally “banked” for use with sick preemies (premature infants) and sometimes the milk is from the mother, and sometimes from a donor, but I do not believe that it is a commercial transaction in this country. Not enough actual “need”, I suppose. In most cases, suitable substitutes such as formula is available.
Could be wrong tho, it’s just my impression from working in neonatal intensive care units years ago.
Many communities have a La Leche League where lactating women donate breast milk. However this is not really commercial. They get really pissed off when (there have been several cases) grown men drank the breast milk as a fetish thing.
Easy to mimic the nutrition content of breast milk. Hard to get all the benefits, including a better immune system for baby. Women! Breastfeed your babies if you can.
Why do you ask the OP?
I’ve often wondered this, myself.
Even the formula makers are now admitting that breast milk is superior to formula, so I think there would be demand for it. There must be some reason that it has not been marketed and sold. (Well, breast milk used to be bought and sold in the form of a wet nurse. Are there any modern day wet-nurses?)
Breast milk is perishable, of course, but IIRC mothers frequently use a breast pump and the store the milk in the fridge or even freeze it. Could frozen human breast milk be marketed?
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/living/DailyNews/breastmilk981223.html
Article is from 1998. Maybe the situation’s changed a bit.
There are some breast milk banks now. Denver has one (they are currently advertising for milk donated by women who are dairy free for some seriously lactose intolerant babies). They were closed down in the early days of AIDS but are slowly making a comeback.
I don’t know of anywhere you can actually buy breast milk. Most women who donate will donate for seriously prem babies or ill babies whose mothers are unable to feed them. Pumping even with a hospital grade pump is fairly hard work and takes time. You need to be fairly dedicated to do it.
There does seem to be a societal distaste for wetnursing. I’ve known women who have breast fed each others’ babies. I wouldn’t do it without knowing absolute details of their HIV status and hepatitis status.
The need to screen for diseases, such as HIV, that can be passed through the breast milk would add greatly to the cost. I don’t think it could ever compete with formula on a cost basis.
It is also important to note that donated breastmilk is, as a substitute, better than formula, but not the same as that which would have come from the child’s own mother.
The breastmilk a mother creates is formulated specifically for her baby. Her milk will change as the baby grows and his needs change. Her milk will also contain antibodies for diseases which are specific to her region.
Not true, sorry. I’ve been involved w/ LLL for several years, and it is not for donating breastmilk. It is instead an organization that provides information and support to mothers who want to breastfeed their babies. LLL has been around for more than 40 years and is a non profit group. Leaders go through fairly rigourous training and are all unpaid volunteers.
What you are thinking of is called a milk bank, where lactating moms can donate milk that is given to sick or premature infants who cannot tolerate formulas. Some insurance plans will pay for the milk. The breastmilk is not for sale to grown men, or even to the general public but is available ONLY to those infants with a need for it.
There are several milk banks throughout the US.
Here’s a URL that explains the process:
http://www.lalecheleague.org/llleaderweb/LV/LVAprMay00p19.html
–tygre
Um, how did a woman become a wet nurse-many I remember reading about had never had babies themselves.
Dr Paprika
it’s not easy to mimic the contents of breast milk. The more we learn about breast milk, the more it becomes clear that formula is not the best thing for babies.
Guinastasia
where did you read about wet nurses routinely bf’ing without having a child? It’s possible for a woman to bf an adopted child but it takes very hard work and often even with an SNS system, the child will need supplementation with formula. Relactating is easier but the woman needs to have breastfed at some stage of her life. I think some wetnurses would never let their milk dry up but would constantly have a baby at the breast without having a pregnancy in between.
/slight hijack
on one of my lists, we were once trolled by a woman who was into feeding her husband. Her webpage was a sight to behold, all the benefits of breastfeeding full grown adult males routinely!
Tygre, thanks for the link. The only baby I saw who used banked milk did it on the advice of an LLL leader.
Primaflora, I think I said formula could mimic nutritional breast milk properties. There are obvious differences in fat and protein percentages, but these are not massive. The benefits of breast milk are not exclusive to IgA,of course, and I agree formula is no substitute for breast milk.
I read somewhere that what commonly occured with wet nurses was that they were servants or peasants who had babies that died around the same time the baby in need of a nurse was born. This ways, the wet-nurse was already lactating and didn’t have a child of her own around to take from the baby she was wet-nursing.
:o
Romance novels…eek!
In the early 1980’s I donated milk to a milk bank run by hospital in the San Jose,CA area. The donors were all TB tested. The milk was checked for bacteria levels and was pasturized if it was high, or if there was anyone sick in the donors household. The milk was available by perscription only and covered by most insurance plans. All premies in this hospital were routinely given mothers milk, either their own mothers or a donors. Another user was a child on dialysis. Apparently mothers milk has very low sodium.
If I can help with more info on the donating/storage question, feel free to email.
<Hijack>
One of my coworkers was vacationing in Florida with her husband and infant son. They decided to stop in at a local church for services and dropped their son off in the nursery. When they went to pick him up, the woman who handed him back said, “He was fussy, so I breast fed him and he calmed right down.” She stood there with her jaw hanging open.
<\hijack>
-LabRat
Not picking on you, Primaflora, but you hit one of my pet peeves. It is extremely rare for a baby to be lactose intolerant. The few babies who are could never tolerate breast milk in any way, shape, or form, regardless of the diet of the mother producing the milk. Human milk contains a generous amount of lactose - far more than bovine milk.
What is relatively common is for a baby to be allergic to certain proteins found in bovine milk. Generally, the foods a mother eats will not affect the content of her milk, but dairy proteins are an exception. A baby with a dairy allergy would benefit from human milk from a mother who stays away from cow’s milk and all products made with it.
There’s a milk bank here in Oslo, and I feel almost guilty that I didn’t sign up, since I have a tremendous amount of milk and no troubles pumping. Also, they pay. However, when my baby was born they were located in downtown Oslo, and I live far enough out of the city that I couldn’t imagine dragging myself and my baby downtown every week to deliver the milk. Now they moved to a more convenient (for me) location, but you have to sign up as a “donor” before the baby is born.
that’s OK flodnak :). I was just picking out of the air an example of a milk bank currently in action - yeah now I come to think of it, it is a bit of an oddity. If I went and trawled through my trash, I think the post actually said they needed women to donate who were dairy free. The lactose intolerance bit of it might have just been my vague mind embroidering it…
Slight hijack/
I used to work in the fish market of a grocery store in Atlanta. Being the mischevious bastard I am when I get bored on the job, I once got on the store’s in-house phone, called the dairy department and demanded to speak to the department manager, Phil. Pretending to be a first-time stay at home father, I acted like I was in a panic because my “wife” supposedly forgot to pump breast milk for our “baby” before she left on a business trip.
“I need human breast milk! My daughter has a severe allergic reaction to any formula food and she only has enough left now for two more feedings… Look, my wife’s an executive at CNN! I’ll pay anything!”
“You can COUNT on me, sir!” Phil declares. I gave him my old pager and told him to call me as soon as he found out anything, then went back to waiting on customers.
Maaaaan, I had Phil running all over the store checking in the baby food aisle and the health food section. He was still trying to find human breast milk when I left the store for the day. I’m not sure if I ever told him it was me all along…