I touched on this a little bit in yesterday’s post, but I feel like it needs a little more fleshing out. Milk banks, regardless of for- or non-profit status, collect, pasteurize, and distribute milk to needy babies throughout the country. No matter what kind of bank the milk is dispensed from, it is very pricey. Even non-profit milk banks charge upwards of $3.25/ounce to cover processing fees. (That’s about $12 for a four-ounce baby bottle, and how many of those does your baby gulp down in a day?)

The National Milk Bank, which calls itself non-profit, sells the milk it gets from generous, unsuspecting donors to Prolacta Bioscience. Prolacta Bioscience then sells the donated breast milk at an undisclosed amount for a profit. The company claims that it doesn’t sell the milk by the ounce, like non-profit milk banks do, that the price “depends on the gestational age and size of the neonate.” Some digging around revealed that all of that is true. They don’t sell their products by the ounce, they sell it by the milliliter, which, for anyone that’s ever taken a science course, is a lot less than an ounce. The price? $6.25 per milliliter. This makes the price per ounce more like $184.83.

$184.83. Per. Ounce.

This isn’t a fair comparison, however. Prolacta’s product is not usually used full-strength; it needs to be mixed with human milk, with the cheapest possible scenario being 20% Prolacta human milk fortifier mixed with 80% mother’s pumped milk. For a theoretical 3-pound baby in the NICU:

• Assume a 3 lb NICU preemie gets fed a total of six ounces of milk a day (a conservative estimate)
• Supplement the mother’s milk 80/20 with Prolacta human milk fortifier (80% breast milk, 20% Prolacta human milk fortifier)
• 80% of 6 ounces = 4.8 ounces mother’s milk
• 20% of 6 ounces = 1.2 ounces Prolacta human milk fortifier
• Cost for 1.2 ounces Prolacta human milk fortifier = ($184.83/ounce X 1.2 ounces) = $221.80
• Over $200 for ONE DAY, assuming the baby doesn’t drink more than six ounces.

By contrast, if the same 3 lb NICU preemie were to get fed a total of six ounces of milk per day from a non-profit milk bank capable of providing 24 calorie/ounce milk (Mother’s Milk Bank of Austin is one of those, as are many others), it would cost $3.25/ounce X 6 ounces = $19.50. Probably most middle-class parents would be able to afford that out of their own pockets, but even if they couldn’t, a non-profit milk bank would make sure any infant that needed it would receive it anyway. There is no such guarantee from a for-profit company like Prolacta.

So let’s recap. For equivalent products and circumstances (3 lb preemie consuming only 6 oz breast milk per day):

This, by the way, is a fair comparison. Food for thought.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Milk Banks, National Milk Bank, For-Profit, Non-Profit, Prolacta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.