Hi all,
Mary Black had sent this to me last week and had intended for it to go
to the list also but her computer was not cooperating. I intended to
send it along the other day but my neighborhood was hit by severe brush
fires and we just got back to our house. We were very lucky. There were
50 houses burned down in our neighborhood, 3 on my street. We are very
thankful. Any ways... here's Mary's response to me:

> Jodie
>
> We handle a few breast milk samples a year in the lab here - it is not that complex to handle.
>
> Clean the areola with water and not any antiseptic solutions which might contaminate the sample. Express the first few drops and then get a sample from a bit later on as well (like a midstream urine sample). If there is an obvious breast abscess you can also aspirate pus from the abscess
>
> Milk can be managed as a straight sample and there is no need to spin it down. Do not try and handle it like a blood specimen and use blood culture bottle as with the likelihood of skin organisms getting into the sample you will only end up with a lot false positive blood culture bottle readings.  Eg from Corynebacteria and Staph epidermidis.
>
> A range of plates could then be used to plate out a few drops of the milk form each of your two samples.
> chocolate agar (lysed blood)
> blood agar
> MacConkey
>
> This should cover Staphs, Streps and fastidious organisms.
>
> Then you can a fungal plate as well, a sabarouds plate although Candida will grow on all of the media and should be pretty easy to pick off the colonies on the plates.
>
> Looking forward to hearing from others on this one - I always learn something new here.
>
> By the way - do you like my new E-mail macro - it omits my title but keeps my degrees as per recent E-mail discussions
>
> Mary E Black
> MB BCh BAO FAFPHM MFPHM MRCP(UK) MPH DTM&H DObst DCH
> University of Queensland, Cairns, Australia
>

Thanks Mary for the info.
Jodi Smart
in very dry and burned Port St. Lucie Florida

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