Banking Liquid Gold

Passionate.  That’s how I would describe the folks that I met at PATH’s headquarters in Seattle.  Perhaps it’s because I arrived the week of the Breakfast for Global Health, PATH’s largest local annual fundraiser, and everyone had their stories rehearsed.  But I don’t think so.  The passion with which people spoke about their projects was palpable.  Number of lives improved.  Number of lives saved!

It is with this enthusiasm that I am diving into my project on milk banking.  What is a milk bank, you ask?  It’s like a blood bank, but for breast milk.  It is a facility that processes milk donated by mothers with excess milk to be used by an infant in need, often in the Neonatal ICU.  Weird, you say?  Well, it’s really wet nursing taken to the next level and that is a practice that many of our ancestors employed.  Modern-day milk banks screen donors for things like disease, lifestyle habits, and medications; pasteurizes the milk to kill viruses (including HIV) while keeping the beneficial parts of the breast milk mostly intact; and tests for any bacterial growth. 

Why all this hoopla over breast milk?  If you guessed that as part of the evolution process, a mother’s milk has evolved to provide many things that her baby needs nutritionally and immunologically, then you’re right!  In fact, it has been shown that infants who are not breastfed have a 6 fold greater risk of dying from infectious diseases in the first 2 months of life than those who are breastfed (WHO Collaborative Study Team, Lancet, 2000).  6 fold!!  To put it in business terms, Brazil estimates that it saves US$540 million each year, mostly due to reduced medical costs.  It's no wonder that it has been termed "liquid gold" by some.  Sadly, due to the marketing efforts of formula giants like Nestle, infant formula has replaced breast milk in many places since it is viewed as an aspirational product that is better than or at least equal to breast milk. 

Back to milk banks – who do they help?  Sometimes, momma can’t feed baby, at least not just yet.  In premature births, a mother sometimes has trouble starting lactation.  It can also help those who are low-birth weight, severely malnourished, orphaned, born to HIV positive mothers or mothers who are otherwise not able to breast feed.  As you can imagine, the number of babies that fall into this category can be quite high in developing countries.

Thus, this summer I’ll be conducting an in-depth country assessment of the market opportunity for milk banking in India and to identify areas in which PATH can accelerate the expansion and adoption of human milk banks.  In India, WHO estimates 48 out of every 1000 babies born die within their first year of birth.  India also reports a high percentage of babies with low-birth weight, low weight-to-height and low height-to-age ratios.  I look forward to trapezing all over the country to learn more about milk banks as well as the culture, and at the end hopefully be able to bring insights and innovation to milk banking!  Lives saved!  (and because I am in business school) Costs avoided!