I was contacted today by a person at Columbia Medical Center in College
Station (our sister city, right next door) and an A&M professor from nuclear
engineering who are supposedly getting funding from Harvard to do some
research on heavy metals contamination of breast milk in Bryan (my town).
>
>Details are sketchy and incomplete (from my perspective), but what I know is:
>A woman in north Bryan living in a relatively new home has four children,
is pregnant with number 5.  Her third and fourth children are both
"quaduplegics" (according to the fellow from Columbia).  In searching for a
cause, they tested her house and the house has enormously high levels of
manganese, zinc, and arsenic.  The research guy says the manganese seems to
have come from construction workers in the neighborhood cutting down trees
and bulldozing dirt and stirring up the dust (???).  Anyway, they suspect
(God knows why) that the route of transmission to the babies was through the
mother's breast milk -- I guess heavy metals concentrate in the breasts?
And so they're interested in finding out how widespread the contamination
is, and whether breast milk is the route of transmission, and whether a
strategy of "pump and dump" for X number of days would get the levels in the
colostrum down low enough to make it "safe" to resume breastfeeding.  They
are hoping to get, through LLL and contacts like me, 30-60 women to donate
samples of colostrum for study.  I told them they needed to ask women who
*weren't* planning on breastfeeding to donate colostrum, as their kids won't
be losing anything in the bargain, but that I couldn't recommend to anyone
planning to breastfeeding that they part with even a drop of their precious
colostrum.   I have LOTS of problems with their line of thinking, which I
have shared with the researcher.  Any other words of wisdom out there?

I'd be especially interested in knowing if anyone else in the country is
currently doing research on heavy metals and breast milk, but hasn't
published yet (i.e., I already did a Medline search and passed along the
results to these folks, but would be interested to know if there are
unpublished, in-progress studies going on right now).

These guys don't seem to have a clue about breastfeeding, but at least they
are asking around. . . he said if they couldn't get colostrum in the first
day or two after birth that they could maybe take milk from day 4 or 5 and
"spin it down" and get the colostrum that way.  Right.  Not.

Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nutrition
Texas A&M University