Breast milk to save premature babies.

The weekly shipment arrived at noon Thursday — 300 ounces of breast milk donated by women across the country and pasteurized at a milk bank in Austin. It was packed with dry ice and shipped via FedEx to feed the most medically fragile premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit at Children’s National Health System.

“Liquid gold,” said Victoria Catalano, a NICU dietitian at the children’s hospital in Washington, holding up a plastic bottle containing three ounces of frozen milk. Then she corrected herself. “Well, that’s liquid gold,” she said, pointing to two large deep freezers stocked with milk the infants’ mothers had produced. “This is the next best thing,” she said.

A growing body of research shows that human milk carries long-term benefits for premature infants and can be lifesaving, but it’s often hard for mothers of premature infants to produce enough. Historically NICUs have supplemented feedings with formula, but now they are increasingly looking to milk sharing — a practice with roots in an ancient tradition of wet nursing — as the nutritional vanguard for babies who are born too soon.

The percentage of advanced neonatal care hospitals across the country that provide donated breast milk has nearly doubled, from 22 percent in 2011 to nearly 40 percent in 2015, according to an unpublished analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by Maryanne Tigchelaar Perrin, an assistant professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Click Here to Learn More