Community Corner

Websites for Sharing Breast Milk Raise Concerns About Health Risks

Bills call for state regulation, but advocates of increasingly popular practice downplay danger to babies

by Andrew Kitchenman, NJSpotlight.com

Are babies being put at risk by the proliferation of unregulated websites that share or sell human breast milk?

Concerns about contamination due to unsafe storage and shipping have doctors and health advocates calling for tighter controls and monitoring of the increasingly popular practice among mothers who can’t produce their own milk.

Find out what's happening in Teaneckwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

And those worries have prompted Assemblywoman Pamela R. Lampitt (D-Burlington and Camden) to introduce two bills that would increase public awareness of the potential dangers of informal milk sharing and require state licensure of milk banks.

The health concerns are backed up by research studies, including a recent one published by the journal Pediatrics, which found that human milk purchased via the Internet exhibited high overall bacterial growth and was frequently contaminated with pathogenic bacteria due to poor collection, storage, or shipping.

Find out what's happening in Teaneckwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Read more at NJSpotlight.com

NJ Spotlight is an issue-driven news website that provides critical insight to New Jersey’s communities and businesses. It is non-partisan, independent, policy-centered and community-minded.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here