Rachel you wrote, "The purpose is NOT to check whether mothers' milk is OK for babies. The purpose is to find out how much of these poisons we all are sitting on, without having to stick people with big nasty needles to get biopsies of adipose tissue." Yes, the stated/official purpose is to test the environmental contamination without using envasive procedures. But the message and the message of this particular study in the Lancet that is sent to mothers is that breastmilk is questionable. The infant formula industry's sway on the media perverts the message. So that when mothers and even professionals read commentaries by the media on studies like this, they assume that somehow breastmilk is the questionable product. How this testing is used is important, too. The original purpose is to monitor toxins in the environment. But how will this information be used clinically? I can tell you right now what will happen. If a mother has a high levels of toxins in her milk, she will be encouraged to wean and use some man-made, "clean" infant formula. The medical community has a history of doing this to breastfeeding. Think about jaundice? When we started to test for jaundice, what happened? When we started testing for glucose levels, what happened? Do scientists have a real handle on what those numbers mean? And what is the relationship of a number to breastfeeding. One number means you can breastfeed and one number you can't breastfeed. No one questions the test. No one questions the principle of not breastfeeding because there is an alternative to breastfeeding. At this point in time, I question what researchers are doing with all the milk they are obtaining. For the last 2 years I have been looking at the patenting of human milk components and the growth of industries based on human milk research. Human milk is used for cloning and is considered a totipotent stem cell. (very much a part of the monoclonal antibody industry) Components of human milk are used in test kits--ELISE, Western Blot and PCR. It is sold to other researchers. (can only be sold for research purposes). So the $64,000 question is do they dump all this milk they don't use? They only need a little bit for the test. Colostrum is a richer source of certain components. Or is this a steady source of a resource that can be sold? Purified human lactoferrin used for research purposes is worth $2000 a gram! No one can tell me that they dump all that milk. At this point in time, I would not encourage any women to donate human milk for research. Until this situation has some kind of regulation, I think women should just trust that their mammary glands know what the hell they are doing. Valerie W. McClain, IBCLC *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html