Advertisement

Ontario’s much-needed breast-milk bank months from opening

Ontario's apparently overdrawn at the breast-milk bank.

The Toronto Star reports that a plan to set up a repository of breast milk for vulnerable babies is still months away from completion six years after it was first proposed.

That compares with British Columbia, which has had one for more than 30 years, and Calgary, whose breast-milk bank opened in April after 16 months of planning.

The Canadian Paediatric Society, in a 2010 position paper, advocated for the creation of breast-milk banks across the country.

"When the mother's own milk is unavailable for the sick, hospitalized newborn, pasteurized human donor breast milk should be made available as an alternative feeding choice followed by commercial formula," the society's paper said.

"There is a limited supply of donor breast milk in Canada and it should be prioritized to sick, hospitalized neonates who are the most vulnerable and most likely to benefit from exclusive human milk feeding."

The Star noted a Toronto hospital has been importing breast milk from an Ohio bank since 2005.

Just why it's taking so long to create an Ontario bank isn't clear. The provincial government earmarked $1.2 million in operating funds last year.

Some critics speculate the delay is due to political red tape, layers of health-care bureaucracy or perhaps lobbying by the makers of infant formula.

"What has been stopping them? It's baffling," Edith Kernerman, president of the Ontario Lactation Consultants Association, told the Star.

"I just don't see how they can't have gone ahead so far. Especially since we know (premature) newborns are heavily compromised — their lives are compromised — when they are not given breast milk."

Health-care professionals working on the project told the Star it's important to conduct research to clearly show the health benefits of breast milk for babies and the bank's cost-benefit equation.

[Related: Human breast milk may block HIV transmission, study finds]

"You don't want to be spending a lot of money that is not worth anything," said Dr. Shoo Lee, chief of pediatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital and the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. "We had to test to make sure it was something beneficial."

Recent research by Lee and others has shown donated breast milk would save the lives of 15 Ontario babies annually by preventing a dangerous bowel condition called necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), which afflicts about 1,500 premature and low birth-weight babies in Ontario each year, the Star said.

"It's the single largest killer of babies in the neonatal intensive care units today," said Lee.

Babies with NEC can't tolerate cow's milk, one of the main ingredients in commercial formula, and some new mothers can't provide breast milk themselves.

A two-year trial in Canadian hospitals that gave babies donor breast milk helped cut the NEC rate to one per cent from seven per cent, the Star noted.

A functioning breast-milk bank would potentially save Ontario $1 million a year because babies would be discharged from neonatal intensive care units sooner, Health Minister Deb Matthews told the Star.

Creation of the Ontario breast-milk bank would actually be a step toward recreating what Canada once had. There used to be 23 banks across the country, however all but the Vancouver facility closed in the late 1980s out of fear of HIV transmission.

The United States has 11 milk banks, with another three in the works.