Omg! Now I have Seen It All!!!

[magnolia74]

www.gumtree.com/london/84/14559784.html

OMG hope it's gold top

I think the donar bank at the hospital told me the charge other hospitals something like £60 a litre for bm!

am sure there is a very good rationale for selling breast milk

i hope

i reckon you've stumbled onto a money spinner there! i could make a small fortune!! £1 per oz is quite cheap though (even though you get 100% profit)

i'm not sure of the morals of selling a product which is free to source!!

They seriously charge for bm??

I'm assuming when the hospital sell it they've aready pastourised it though???

Its funny but I am quite comfortable with the thought of dobating but selling it just doesn't seem right

They charge other hospitals for it - not the parents!

Ok donating is what I meant

It's no different than the 'wet-nurse'. Under any guise or name, women have been sourcing out their breast milk since the dawn of man.

Even charging hopsitals for it doesn't seem right though.

Blimey I could have made a fortune If I had known people would buy it. Dh could deliver for a small fee too

wet nursing is a bit different, as the woman would breastfeed your baby, and the baby would get the physical act of being breastfed, whereas this is being fed EBM from a bottle

Yes but one hospital has had to pay to have your blood checks done, paid to store the donated milk, have to had it pastourised etc and then they would have to get it couriered to another hospital. So if one hospital is always supplying and anoter just taking then one PCT/hospital is funding 2 areas IYSWIM which means the original hospital has less money to spend on other stuff for its patients

actually, i'd be happier donating my expressed bm than i would nursing someone else's child. the breastfeeding relationship (dyad major and dyad minor) is so complex and can be fraught, that i wouldn't want to enter into that with anyone other than my own child. i'd happily donate some breast milk for someone though, although my mw told me that a lot of milk banks closed because the antibodies in one mother's milk could be harmful to another woman's child.

also - if you're pasteurising bm, aren't you killing a lot of the antibodies and pro-biotics which make it so great? so is there much advantage to pastuerised bm over formula? other than obviously for dairy intolerant babies...

I can't help thinking that expressing an oz of milk is a lot of effort to go to for a quid! Although I'm sure it adds up.

She also sys she will express to order, perhaps it is more than one person

I'm not sure what they do to the milk (pastourise/sterilse/UHT) but I know for prem babies the staff refer to it as "gold" and it is much much better for the babies than any formula.

They were so grateful for what I donated it made all the hassle of it worthwhile.

Sabrina - it depends how efficient you are at pumping. i can get 4oz in about ten minutes! so that's £4 for 10 minutes work, which isn't bad. the only thing is, if you kept that up, you'd be permanently engorged, and obviously, the more you get out, more gets made! i wonder if she's bf-ing her own child as well?

CarGirl - how did you find out that your hospital took donations? did they just ask you? i'd be happy to donate, and my supply is so well-established that it wouldn't make any difference!
what sort of screening process do you have to go through?

I was wondering that UD, if she's anyting like me at the start of b/f ds1 I was flowing all over the place

Look here for more info re donating bm

You have to have blood tests, your baby has to be less than six months old when you start donating (DS2 was just under 6m when I started doing it).

I knew my hospital had a bank and I approached them when I was pregnant. They will only accept milk until your youngest is 6 months old (I think after that what you produce is far less beneficial for premmies).

They took blood and got it tested for various stuff like HIV that kind of thing. Gave me pre-sterilsed bottles to express into, I had to label them up etc and I had to take them along and stick them in their freezer and fill a form in (I think).

I just stock piled in the freezer and went once a week to drop off.

Free to source Urban?

You mean like.....water or something?

If only I had known....I could have earned myself about £25 day when DS stopped feeding

CarGirl, they'll accept it past your baby being 6 months if you start donating before your baby's 6 months old. I gave them almost two litres over about three months, then had to stop as I went back to work, etc.