LINK
Sides clash over putting price on mothers' milk
By Marsha Austin
Denver Post Staff Writer
Sides clash over putting price on mothers' milk
There is a booming trade in mothers' breast milk.
The nation's largest nonprofit milk banks, including one in Denver, distributed 745,329 ounces last year - double the amount in 2000 - at a cost of $2.6 million.
Prolacta Bioscience, a for- profit company, in August started marketing a breast-milk concentrate for $48 an ounce.
And some mothers are selling their own milk on the Internet for $1 to $2.50 an ounce - more than a third less than milk from the big banks.
Since January, one popular website has listed more than 100 human-milk advertisements.
This is all going on with little regulation, raising ethical and safety questions.
Such ventures also are prompting concerns that the steady flow of donated milk that nonprofit banks supply to hospitals and mothers could dry up.
"It could affect supply," said Laraine Lockhart-Borman, who runs the Mothers' Milk Bank of Denver at Presbyterian/St. Luke's Medical Center.
"We've been asking for regulation for years," she said.
The federal Food and Drug Administration has not reached a decision on whether breast milk should, like human blood or tissue, be regulated, said agency spokesman Stephen King.
"The FDA would need more information to make such a determination," King said. "It would also be part of the discussions, if the FDA were to regulate human breast milk, if we would regulate these products as food or human biological products."
A jump in donations
Only two states - California and Texas - require breast- milk distributors to be licensed as milk banks.
"It is to protect the safety of the public's health," said Pauline Sakamoto, executive director of the Mothers' Milk Bank of San Jose, Calif.
"The casual sharing thing, God forbid that a child gets ill with HIV or hepatitis ... from a mother's milk," Sakamoto said.
Nevertheless, the Internet and the ease of collecting and storing milk make tracking individual sales tough, said Jennifer Laycock, founder of The Lactivist, a Web log on breast-feeding.
"When you have two people talking via e-mail, it's nearly impossible to stop," she said.
The rising trade was sparked by studies showing that human breast milk is better for babies than manufactured formula.
The growing number of premature babies, some as young as 24 weeks, who are now kept alive by advanced medical interventions has also bolstered demand.
"In the 1970s, when I was in medical school, breast-feeding was not encouraged," said Dr. Jeffrey Hanson, a hospital-based neonatologist with Denver- based Pediatrix/Obstetrix.
A 1997 article in the medical journal Pediatrics is widely seen as a turning point. The paper documented breast milk's ability to decrease the incidence of diarrhea, infections, sudden infant death syndrome and allergies, as well as possibly raising IQ levels.
"The good Lord did this for a reason,"
Hanson said. "This really is the best formula."
The Human Milk Banking Association of North America - which has 12 members including Denver - saw donations jump 131 percent in the past six years.
Founded in 1984, the Denver milk bank - one of the largest, along with San Jose and Austin, Texas - has seen a 14 percent increase during the same period.
Association members use standards from blood banks, said Francis Jones, the group's board chair and director of the British Columbia Women's Hospital's milk bank in Vancouver.
"We do feel strongly that mothers need to know and clearly understand who they're giving their milk to and what we're doing with the milk," Jones said.
Mothers donate the milk for free.
The banks screen donating mothers for HIV, hepatitis and other viral infections and set restriction on caffeine consumption. Donors cannot smoke or drink alcohol.
The banks pasteurize the milk and charge a "processing fee" of about $3.50 an ounce, or $100 a day to supply the typical 6-month-old.
The banks distribute the processed milk to hospitals and by prescription to individual mothers who can't produce enough milk or can't breast-feed.
"Human blood, human tissue or human milk should not be something that you can buy," said Lockhart-Borman. "Most moms donate out of the goodness of their heart."
Experts warn of dangers
Prolacta Bioscience, based in Monrovia, Calif., is selling a concentrated form
AdvertisementGetAd('tile','box','/business_article','','www.denverpost.com','','null ','null');
of breast milk aimed at premature babies. The company says it can produce 10 million ounces a year - more than 13 times as much as all the nonprofit banks processed last year.
"We're in a completely different market segment than the milk banks like Denver's," said Elena Medo, Prolacta's founder and chief executive.
As medical technology has allowed younger infants to survive outside the womb, the need for immune-boosting, calcium- and fat-rich mother's milk has grown, Medo said.
"These are the kids who make me feel there is no ethical problem," she said. "If we have to be a for-profit to do it, so be it."
Prolacta - through the National Milk Bank, a nonprofit group the corporation helped set up - is approaching hospitals, including some in Colorado, to start milk-collection programs. The company then offers to buy the raw milk, process it and sell the concentrate to hospitals.
"Is it ethical for mothers to be recruited to donate and then both the hospital and Prolacta make a profit from the milk donated?" asked Jolene Beford, a lactation consultant at Penrose Community Hospital in Colorado Springs.
Penrose, which sends milk to the Denver milk bank, decided not to take up the offer. Prolacta made its first 10 shipments to hospitals this month, Medo said.
Milk-bank proponents' biggest concern with Prolacta is the use of the National Milk Bank to gather milk.
"It's just a front," said Lockhart-Borman. "It's not a true milk bank."
The National Milk Bank website describes itself as "a nationwide, nonprofit organization that collects donated human milk."
The milk - from hospitals, midwives and nursing mothers - is sent to Prolacta and "prepared for shipment to infants in (neonatal intensive-care units) nationwide," the site says.
The organization did not respond to requests for an interview through either its toll-free number or its attorney.
At the same time, the Internet trade is also growing.
EBay, the world's largest Internet auctioneer, has barred the sale of human breast milk, but since January, a blog on radioball.net has had 100 postings from women seeking to buy or sell milk.
"Men are compensated for sperm donation, as well as women who donate their eggs. Why shouldn't we be compensated for breast milk too?" said Hillary Moon, a Denver mother of two who is trying to sell her breast milk online.
Many lactation consultants say such transactions, no matter how good the intention, are still dangerous.
"When you're buying it on the Internet, you don't know what you're getting," said Jones, of the milk bank association.
Still, women who posted ads on the radioball.net site said in interviews that they saw an opportunity to offer milk at a lower price than milk banks while making a little extra income.
"We sell plasma in blood banks ... so who is to say what is appropriate?" said Ellyn King of Eugene, Ore., who is also on radioball.net.
"There is a demand for both blood and breast milk," she said, "and both have a price."
Selling breastmilk...
