Human Milk Banking In North America
A human milk bank is "a service which collects, screens, processes, and dispenses by prescription human milk donated by nursing mothers who are not biologically related to the recipient infant". There are currently eleven milk banks in North America. They are usually housed in hospitals, although sometimes they are free standing. They are members of the Human Milk Bank Association of North America (HMBANA) and voluntarily abide by HMBANA's annually revised "Guidelines for the Establishment and Operation of a Donor Human Milk Bank." The guidelines were developed with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and include protocols for soliciting donors, collecting, processing and distributing the milk. Some of these protocols are described below.
According to a joint statement by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF): "The best food for a baby who cannot be breastfed is milk expressed from the mother's breast or from another healthy mother. The best food for any baby whose own mother's milk is not available is the breastmilk of another healthy mother" (UNICEF, p. 48). "Where it is not possible for the biological mother to breast feed, the first alternative, if available, should be the use of human milk from other sources. Human milk banks should be made available in appropriate situations" (Wight, 2001).
Read more about Human Milk Banking In North America: Screening Donors, Collection, Screening and Processing Milk, Distribution, Costs, Donors, Recipients, Risks and Mitigation, Milk Banks, Milk Banking Alternatives
Famous quotes containing the words human, milk, banking, north and/or america:
“Women—one half the human race at least—care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“this is the night, and this the happy time
When the tinned milk of human kindness is
Upheld and holed by radio-appeal.”
—William Robert Rodgers (1909–1969)
“One of the reforms to be carried out during the incoming administration is a change in our monetary and banking laws, so as to secure greater elasticity in the forms of currency available for trade and to prevent the limitations of law from operating to increase the embarrassment of a financial panic.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“I felt that he, a prisoner in the midst of his enemies and under the sentence of death, if consulted as to his next step or resource, could answer more wisely than all his countrymen beside. He best understood his position; he contemplated it most calmly. Comparatively, all other men, North and South, were beside themselves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)