I can’t believe it took me this long to realize this. I’m sorry I didn’t see it before. I just now noticed another glaring inconsistency with the International Breast Milk Project.

Does anyone remember their old website? I found this old webpage for the IBMP (cached on October 6, 2006) and saw this really intriguing quote, “Our third shipment got underway Tuesday, October 3, when 6000+oz of milk started its journey from donors home to Prolacta Bioscience in California, where it will be processed.”

The first time I read that, I understood it to mean that the third shipment of over 6,000 ounces was underway to Africa on October 3, 2006. But that’s not quite what it means. What that quote means is that donors here in the United States donated over 6,000 ounces of breast milk and that breast milk was sent to Prolacta for processing. Okay.

That third shipment was delivered to Africa on Thanksgiving 2006, according to an online TIME article. Also according to the TIME article, that third shipment contained about 23 gallons of breast milk. When you convert 23 gallons to ounces, you get almost 3,000 ounces. This makes sense because Penny Reimers herself confirmed it when she said the first three shipments were quite a bit less than the fourth one, which was about 5,300 ounces.

The International Breast Milk Project’s third shipment was not quite 3,000 ounces.

Wasn’t the third shipment supposed to be over 6,000 ounces? Isn’t that what the International Breast Milk Project website led everyone to believe on October 6, 2006? This was before the October 23, 2006 Oprah show, so the IBMP already knew Prolacta was skimming off the top, if they announced on their website they had gotten over 6,000 ounces to be processed by Prolacta and then turned around and only shipped less than half of it to Africa. I mean, how else do you explain 3,000 ounces of donated breast milk not accounted for?

The International Breast Milk Project must have known Prolacta was taking a cut — quite a substantial one — before the Oprah show aired. It seems awfully convenient that they would leave out such important information before letting Oprah Winfrey endorse their “cause.”

Another observation: The third shipment to Africa from the International Breast Milk Project was on Thanksgiving 2006. It contained about 3,000 ounces of processed breast milk. The fourth shipment from the International Breast Milk Project wasn’t delivered until May of 2007. That’s six months after the third shipment, way after the Oprah show (which aired October 23, 2006), and after the IBMP was flooded with breast milk donations from Oprah fans and the positive publicity that show generated for them. By IBMP’s accounting, the Oprah show generated about 55,000 ounces in breast milk donations, not including the 6,000+ ounces received before the Oprah special ever aired.

Why it is that after the International Breast Milk Project was flooded with breast milk donations, the IBMP couldn’t find the time to do exactly what it set out to do in the first place, which is to say, send breast milk to Africa, for six months?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 11:16 am and is filed under Milk Banks, Breastfeeding, Lactation, Oprah, For-Profit, Prolacta, Africa, International Breast Milk Project. 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.