Hello, My name is Jessica and I am a Nursing Student currently attending
the College of Nursing at the University of North Dakota. I chose to
participate in Lactnet because I appreciate the importance of breast-
feeding and I am always happy to keep learning about the issues that
surround it.
In order to increase my knowledge of breast-feeding, I chose to
further investigate Human Milk Banks. There are a couple reasons I chose
this as a discussion piece. One of the reasons is that the available
resource of the human milk bank seems to be a fact that is unknown to many
people, including health care workers. When discussing the topic with a
fellow student, I got the reply, “A Breast Milk Bank, is there really such
a thing?”. Another reason would be to discover more about the human breast
milk banks as I know very little.
I have done a review of the literature regarding the topic and
have found reassuring as well as unreassuring qualities of human breast
milk banks. I was surprised that the human milk bank is not a new concept,
it has been around for awhile. It seems as though the banks had some
difficulty thriving in the mid-1980's with many of them closing down. The
reason for this is that HIV was a relatively new disease at that point and
there was concern of the transmission to infants via banked breast milk
(Arnold, 1997).
I was wondering about how safe the breast milk really is.
According to Tully (2000) donors are routinely screened for disease as
mandated by the Human Milk Banking Association of North America (HMBANA).
It was concluded that the donors were, in general, very healthy with only
one out of 770 testing positive for Hepatitis C and one for HTLV (Tully,
2000a). It is reassuring to know that there are guidelines for screening
and the milk is safe for mothers to utilize. Although the milk is
carefully handled and stored there is always a risk of contamination
making it unsafe. One article I reviewed discussed an outbreak of
Pseudomonas Aeruginosa at the neonatology and NICU. The milk bank
pasteurizer was found to be the culprit for this organism which is found
naturally in the environment. The milk was tested before being put into
bottles and frozen, but not again during the thawing out and warming
process (Guen et al., 2003).
The other thing I questioned was availability and cost of a human
milk bank. I would consider this to be a barrier to the use of the human
milk bank. The amount of work, time, and money put into banking the milk
is substantial. There is the cost of medical tests for the donors and
recruitment, equipment used for gathering and storing the milk, the cost
of transporting milk, and many more incurred costs ( Tully, 2000b).
While I did acquire a great deal of knowledge regarding this topic
I am interested in learning more about how this service is utilized in
practice. I would appreciate any response about this subject. Do you refer
the use of Human Milk Banks often in your practice? How does the
population you may refer to the Bank feel about utilizing the services?
What is your official opinion regarding the Human Milk Bank?
References
Arnold, L.D. (1997). How North America Donor Milk Banks Operate: Results
of a Survey, Part 1. Journal of Human Lactation, 13(2). Pgs.159-164.
Tully, M.R. (2000a). A Year of Remarkable Growth for Donor Milk Banking in
North America. Journal of Human Lactation, 16(3). Pgs. 235-236.
Tully, M.R. (2000b). Cost of Establishing and Operating a Donor Human Milk
Bank. Journal of Human Lactation, 16(1). Pgs. 57-59.
Gras-Le Guen, C., Lepelletier, D., Debillon, T., Gournay, V., Espaze E.,
Roze, J.C., (2003). Contamination of a milk bank pasteurizer causing a
Psuedomonas Aeruginosa outbreak in a neonatal intensive care unit. Arch
Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed. 88, F434-F435.
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