LISTEN: Breast milk shortage threatens premature babies, reserve appeals for donations
The South African Breast Milk Reserve is calling on healthy mothers to donate breast milk, as demand continues to outpace supply.
Founder and Executive Director, Stasha Jordan, says the organisation currently has about 1 500 units of donated milk in storage.
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She says it only covers one month’s supply for the thousands of premature and critically ill babies who rely on it each year.
Jordan says donor milk is often a lifeline for newborns in neonatal intensive care units.
She says in some cases, mothers are too ill to breastfeed.
“Breast milk donations support very vulnerable babies at the beginning of the life cycle, when sometimes their own mummies pass away during labour birth. It matters, especially if they leave behind very low birth weight babies that can only drink breast milk.
“When babies weigh less than 1.8 kilos, it is dangerous to feed them artificially because they are risk [for] necrotising enterocolitis.”
Between 2014 and 2017, the UKZN's Centre for Rural Health partnered with KZN Health to run a similar human milk bank project.
"The quality control is testing all donors for HIV, Hepatitis, syphilis, and thereafter we run microbiological screenings of the breast smoke pre and post pasteurization alongside a quarantine period where the breast smoke is kept at minus 20 for over 14 days and that inactivates cytomegalovirus, so the quality controls are quite substantial, very similar to other human tissue banking efforts."
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