The idea of shipping milk from Africa to the rest of the world made me laugh out loud.

I am now the coordinator of a tiny milk bank in a low-income hospital in South Africa.  Twice this month we ran completely out of milk..... Every. Last. Drop.  And yet only the most dire cases get donor milk; at 1600 g, they are already “big enough” to go on to formula and leave the precious stocks for someone smaller and more fragile. Our doctors are quite militant about getting milk from the mothers of the prem babies primarily, and topping up with donor milk as a last resort. Yet we never have excess milk. 

At the same time, I read a story about an American gay couple expecting twins from a surrogate and meantime collecting milk from Eats on Feet and HM4HB mothers (2 – 3 months worth already for the presumably to-be-healthy full-term twins).  I wondered what I am doing wrong, and thought how nice it would be to have milk flowing in like that here. Evidently, I thought, it is so much easier to get excess milk from well-nourished women with little else to do. (Incidentally, that is NOT the profile of any of  our donors, and probably not of many donors worldwide!)

When we started the milk bank, one of our feeder clinics had a meeting to gather support for us.  20 mothers were willing to donate, but only 6 of them were non-smokers.  In the end, two of them arrived for the blood tests, and one of those turned out to have Hepatitis B. Most of the other mothers we’ve found are working women, ready to wean within months because of the current societal norms.   So let’s not have too rosy a picture of healthy willing African mothers dying to sell milk to the “idle rich”.  The doctors and I already drive too many kms each week collecting the little milk we have, and I doubt that the volumes of milk we’ve obtained have covered the cost of blood tests yet, if we add up all the incidentals.  

I can’t begin to imagine how we would get volumes into our hands to ship anywhere else.  However anyone who can fathom out a cost-effective way should step up and do it; that’s how things get done after all!  Maybe paying the mothers for the milk will work, but flaws in that system have surfaced throughout the decades, and now in most countries it it illegal to sell any human tissue.  Undoubtedly those who donate have other paybacks, as do all volunteers (if only in knowing that they are doing good).  We have just held a Mother’s Day tea for our donors, and what fun it was!

As for why donated milk is not more freely available: economies of scale, for sure.  Cows’ milk moves around the country in huge volumes and donor milk is transported in mls or ounces, and the costs of testing are also hugely disproportionate. There is always a cost to donating milk (there is even a cost to breastfeeding directly, for that matter).  There are personal and family adjustments to be made, time taken to give of one’s body and taken from another fulfilling part of life.  What happens to a cow who doesn’t “donate” her milk to us?  Hamburger patties, that’s what.  A human who doesn’t donate milk  goes on to have a really great and full life, doing something else.  I also can’t make my best donors breed with great studs to get future generations of good donors.... Sigh, we have to leave everything to chance, and to the milk of human kindness.

I invite you to visit our blog  http://drops4life.wordpress.com/  and to leave a comment.

Best wishes
Jacquie Nutt IBCLC
Drops4Life
South Africa

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