Thursday, August 25, 2005

Second opinion: Take it to the bank, breast milk is best: "
By ANDRE PICARD
Globe and Mail
Thursday, August 25, 2005 Page A13
Earlier this month, a California company launched the world's first commercial breast-milk bank. Prolacta Bioscience plans to obtain breast milk from lactating mothers around the United States, pasteurize it, and sell it to hospitals for the treatment of low-birth-weight babies. "Human breast milk has 100,000 different components and we only really know what a few thousand of them are and what they do," Elena Medo, chief executive officer of Prolacta, said at the launch of the venture. "It's an enormous area of discovery. I'm sure there's a reason for every one of those components and I'd like to know half of them in my lifetime." Dr. Medo, a scientist and entrepreneur, is saying what mothers have been saying for millenniums: Breast is best. The tragedy of this story is that a company is commercializing breast milk at a time when Canada has virtually abandoned its very successful network of not-for-profit breast-milk banks...