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

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