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Strollerderby
Aid Orgs to Moms: Send Money, Not Milk
Remember that “urgent call for breastmilk donations to Haiti’s babies” that was flying around the internet earlier this week?
Not so fast. Aid organizations on the ground in Haiti, including UNICEF
and the Red Cross, are still not accepting any human milk donations.
I got an e-mail from at least half a dozen moms this week asking for breastmilk donations, saying aid organizations in Haiti were ready to receive them on the USS Comfort off of Haiti’s coast. The milk was desperately needed, they said. I was surprised, since UNICEF had been firm on this point two days earlier: they were not accepting milk.
They still aren’t, and have asked the Human Milk Bank Association of North America to retract their call for donations.
While donations of breastmilk are well-intentioned, the aid workers on the ground say they are neither safe nor necessary. They are working with moms to help them continue or reestablish lactation with their babies. The few babies who can’t be breastfed have ample access to breastmilk alternatives, says UNICEF.
Over 500 ounces of human breastmilk were delivered to the USS Comfort, a Navy aid ship with a neonatal intensive care unit on board. The ship has ample freezer space to store the milk, but aid workers say they haven’t used any of the donated milk.
The U.S. Office For Disaster Assistance says that concerns about transportation, screening, handling and storage make donated milk unsafe to use in the current conditions that exist in Haiti. The American Red Cross,
Doctors Without Borders and World Vision have all said there was never a need for donated milk.
They also do not need or want donations of infant formula. Babies being formula-fed are at much higher risk for opportunistic infection than those being breastfed. UNICEF has said they want to keep track of any infants receiving formula so they can provide additional medical monitoring for those infants. The organization also considers it unsafe to use bottles at all right now, due to the lack of clean water, and wants to train anyone giving a baby supplemental food on the use of a cup and spoon feeding technique.
If you have milk to donate, you should absolutely contact your local milk bank. There are plenty of babies closer to home who can benefit from your generous donation. If you want to help the babies in Haiti, send money.
Photo: Daniel Lobos
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6 Comments
[...] Aid Orgs to Moms: Send Money, Not Milk [...]
Haiti Illegal Adoptions: “If People Want to Help … This Is Not the Way” | Strollerderby commented on Feb 02 10 at 7:55 pmSamID commented on Jan 31 10 at 2:13 pmSo when is Babble going to change the headline on the front page that says Haiti needs breast milk?
Barb commented on Feb 01 10 at 8:57 amMy local paper had an article yesterday asking for mothers to donate breast milk. We have one of the 9 breast milk centers in the country in our city, and they listed all the rules to donate (there’s a million things you need to do before your milk is accepted… with good reason!). This information is so confusing, but I’d encourage breastfeeding women to donate if they can! If the milk doesn’t make it to Haiti, it will still be put to good use.
anon commented on Feb 01 10 at 2:52 pmIt took three days after msnbc published this information for you to catch up, at least on my computer. During those three days, the urgent call for breastmilk was near the top of the screen you see when you log on to Babble. This revised info is not. If you want people to think of Babble as a reliable source of information, I can think of a couple of ways to fix this. Do your own original reporting, instead of relying on press releases. Have some staffer eyeballing feedback on the weekends so that corrections can be made in a timely way. And try to publish corrections (or updates, as some people like to call them) in the same place that people would have seen the original mistake.
Sierra Black commented on Feb 01 10 at 3:10 pmI’m not an editor, so I can only speak from the writing end, but I know we did add a correction at the top of the article about the call for breastmilk.
anon commented on Feb 01 10 at 7:10 pmSierra, the msnbc article was posted early Friday, I believe. Babbles correction was posted either late Sunday night or early Monday morning. And the headline on the home page stayed just as factually inaccurate as ever.
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