Bacteriological quality control in a human milk bank

The best nutrient for newborn babies is breast milk and preferably provided via breast feeding. Pooled human milk must be used when the babies' own mother's milk is not available. Very often pooled milk is pasteurised. Recent studies, however, suggest avoidance of any sterilisation procedures in view of the decreased nutritional value and loss of anti-infective benefits associated with heating of human milk. In this study a quality control system of banked human milk based on the recent literature is presented. The purpose of systematic bacteriological monitoring is to separate those milk samples contaminated with pathogenic bacteria from the bulk of the collected milk which has only light contamination with likely nonpathogenic skin bacteria. According to our new standards of classification, over 60 per cent of the collected milk proved to be sufficiently free of bacteria to be fed unheated to pre-term infants. Most of the remainder could be fed unheated to full-term infants and less than 10 per cent had to be pasteurised.