Breast milk banks

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Nothing can prepare you for the heartbreaking reality of a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It’s a place most of us will never visit; a place expectant parents pray they’ll never need, and the driving force behind the vital work of the Perron Rotary Express Milk Bank at King Edward Memorial Hospital for Women, in Perth, Western Australia.
The program is headed by Professor Karen Simmer, medical director of the Neonatology Clinical Care Unit at both King Edward and the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, and deputy chair of the Academic Board at the University of Western Australia.
Professor Simmer explains just what running Perron Rotary Express Milk Bank – known to all as PREM Bank – entails. “Breast milk banks are not actually a new concept,” she begins. “They existed for decades before the HIV epidemic forced their closure.” In many ways an extension of wet-nursing, breast milk banks are not far removed from blood banks, a familiar and socially accepted concept.
 “There’s no doubt that human breast milk is the best possible food for premature babies,” explains Professor Simmer. “It is more easily digested than formula, it contains factors that boost infants’ immune systems, plus unique proteins and growth factor hormones that can’t be replicated.” The challenge Professor Simmer and her colleague, Dr Ben Hartmann, chose to tackle was providing safe breast milk to premature babies whose mothers cannot provide it. “When a baby is born prematurely, the mother’s body is often not yet ready to produce breast milk,” Professor Simmer explains. “Donated milk was the obvious solution, but the issue was how to ensure a safe supply. The technology required to pasteurise milk has been available for a long time, but the question for us was how to treat the milk so no pathogens remained without destroying the active factors that make the milk so valuable.”
World-first technology
Pasteurisation is the accepted method of ensuring milk is free of pathogens. Milk is heated to a predetermined temperature for a defined period of time, usually between 72 and 75°C for 27 seconds. This procedure destroys any bacteria that may be found in the milk. The unfortunate side effect of pasteurising human breast milk has been the destruction of many of the valuable, yet fragile, proteins that provide the greatest nutritional benefit to infants. The development of a new method of safe, reliable pasteurisation that preserves and protects the proteins and antibodies is a world first from the team at King Edward Memorial Hospital, Perth, and the University of Western Australia.
The unit is part of a feasibility study currently under way that is aimed at developing a framework for opening milk banks around Australia.
The Australian network
There are currently only two breast milk banks in Australia, the PREM Bank at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, and a pilot program at the John Flynn Private Hospital on the Gold Coast. The latter is part of a feasibility study being run by the Department of Health. Mother‘s Milk Bank, a charity linked with the John Flynn Hospital unit, is dedicated to developing a permanent milk bank on the Gold Coast and a network of milk banks around the country.

For more information, visit www.mothersmilkbank.com.au.