Good point. But it’s still not dirtier than breast milk, especially if it was gathered via a spread labia/squat and pee in a cup method.
Depending on the population studied, up to 63% of EBM (expressed breast milk) in NICUs is considered unsafe for raw consumption (cite). Luckily, freezing breast milk is even more effective than heating it to reduce bacterial counts to safe levels(cite), so if you’re worried about your expressed milk, just freeze it for a few days before using it.
Gah, I wrote that all kinds of wrong.
Of course, heating will reduce the bacterial counts to zero (or close enough), but it also damages the milk, while freezing lowers the bacterial counts to safe levels without damaging the milk as much.
It’s theoretically possible to get HIV from breast milk. Not likely for adults (more likely for infants), but possible. I think it’s also possible that hepatitis B could be transmitted that way. So drinking breast milk from a container in the office fridge isn’t entirely risk-free.
No, its certainly not. But I’m wondering what you are doing drinking milk that is not yours, labeled, and is in a container that looks suspiciously like a baby bottle and doesn’t even really look like milk - since its seperated and non homogenized.
It isn’t like women pump into little cardboard milk containers.
Only on the Dope could a discussion on mysterious stall noises turn into a debate on whether it’s safer to drink breast milk or urine.
Yes, but I’d imagine that the pasteurization process would hurt like hell. :eek:
Is there a standard container for the breast milk that comes with breast pumps, or do you use whatever container you’ve got? If you use whatever’s handy, someone, somewhere may well have used a little cardboard milk container at least once. And people don’t necessarily look at or smell milk before putting it in their coffee.
(I don’t steal milk, breast or otherwise, from communal fridges, and I suspect nobody here does, either. But somebody does.)
Of course, if breast milk did contain HIV or hepatitis B viruses, the risk of having a closed container of it in the same fridge as your lunch is pretty much imaginary. You’d have to drink the breast milk to be at any risk at all, AIUI, and even then it’s minimal.
Incidentally, did you know that human breast milk is kosher and parve, not dairy?
I pumped in a bathroom stall but with a handheld manual pump so I didn’t need an outlet. It wasn’t the best place ever but the bathrooms were always immaculate and there are only a few women who use that bathroom at all. If I have to ever do it again I think I’m going to ask if there is a better place with a better chair though. After my first baby I was all shy about pumping in a pretty much all-male office and our HR head was an old guy too, not someone I wanted to discuss it with. Now I have lost all embarassment and we have a new woman in HR so I probably would try. All our offices and conference rooms unfortunately have big glass fronts though, so I might get stuck in a supply closet or something, but I’m not going anywhere that doesn’t lock from the inside!
I kept my milk in the office fridge, but it was sealed tightly in containers and then kept in an insulated bag, so no one could see it. It was in those Avent containers so it’s not like someone was going to drink it by mistake. It was hours before I could get it home so I don’t think ice packs could have kept it cold enough for that long in an overheated office.
Yes, every pump that I know of is part of a system that comes with its own kind of containers. The containers screw onto the pump so you are pumping directly into the container. Some people store it in special plastic bags to take up less room in a freezer though, but I don’t know why someone would see a liquid in a bag and think that looks like a good idea to break open.
Breast milk won’t stay good if you don’t keep it in a sterile and tightly sealed container, so while I guess it is possible that someone pumps and then transfers the milk into something else, it doesn’t seem likely or advantageous to do so.
And every one of those containers I’ve ever seen is made to be a functional baby bottle - you aren’t looking at these things and thinking “coffee creamer.”
Well, I’ve learned something - breast milk is apparently not considered a biohazard (although I’m not sure why it isn’t, since it can transmit HIV and hepatitis, and workers who handle it frequently are required to wear protection). It’s food for your baby to you, but it’s someone else’s bodily fluid to me. In North America, we are pretty much universally opposed to people storing their bodily fluids in community fridges.
