Anne Mitchell wants to know what to do about a shortage of access to human
milk. Basically, she could organize with others in her community to start a
milk bank which operates with the safety and health regulations necessary to
insure consumer protection. Keeping always in mind that her main consumers
are often very ill, fragile individuals who can't even be exposed to milk of
mothers using herbs, mega-vitamins, over-the-counter or most prescribed
meds. (You see, the screening process doesn;t just screen for diseases, but
for practices which make the milk unacceptable to the medically fragile for
other reasons that pasteurization won't fix).
Having just spent 2 years working in a a great team to start a bank in
Austin, I can share that it is quite a rewarding experience. However, there
is no way to provide this service which is going to prove inexpensive. Just
consider rent on a centrally located facility with parking access that
allows moms with babes in the carseat a way to jump out and drop off milk.
Consider the logistics of having someone there to log the drop-off and get
the milk into a freezer. Just consider the costs of freezers and the
alarms for the freezers in case the power goes off, and an auxillary power
supply so you dont lose your milk if you do lose power. Just consider the
bottles and containers you need to put the donor milk in, and how clean they
must be. Visit a dairy and take a look at the sterilization needed in terms
of the equipment for handling the milk. Price a pasteurizer. On and on it
goes. We're not talking golf junkets for the medical directors here.
I keep sensing an implication that there is some sort of
conspiracy goiing on to deprive people of human milk by artificially
inflating costs or by requiring things which unnecessarily inflate costs.
We begged, borrowed and cajoled donations and reduced-fee services rather
shamelessly. The cost of the milk would be twice what it is if it weren't
for the fact
everyone worked for free after doing their reg jobs all day. We have 1 and
1/2 paid staff today, and everyone else is STILL working for free to make
sure our freezers are full of clean, safe milk.
Milk banks are fail-safe mechanisms for the most desperate cases. And if
there are lots of desperate cases, then we need more banks. But the costs
are what they would be to open any tissue bank, because milk is a tissue.
This didn't dissuade us, and any serious effort to set up a bank anywhere
else will be supported by the milk banking community. I know that, because
the Mothers Milk Bank at Austin got so much info and encouragement from the
other banks and from HMBANA. I know we'd welcome any ideas on safe ways to
reduce costs. We offer tours of our milk bank in Austin and our books are
an open, public record. Anyone wanting to know how much it costs ought to
come visit a bank, take a tour, get a real feel for what is involved, and
then go home and do the work. Ideally, every city in the country should
have its own human milk bank, just as they mostly all have their own blood
banks.
And we should never, ever lose sight of the most obvious way to insure that
more babies get human milk: better support for breastfeeding so that babies
get their own mom's milk for free!
Barbara Wilson-Clay, BSEd, IBCLC
Austin Lactation Associates, Austin, Texas
http://www.jump.net/~bwc/lactnews.html
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