Today@Dal

From Monday's Globe and Mail:

[Dr. Shoo Lee, Mount Sinai Hospital] calculates donor milk in Canada could save as many as 100 babies each year, plus health-care costs. The price of treating each baby that gets NEC [necrotizing entercolitis] runs about $100,000.

“It would pay for your cost of a bank. One bank,” says Kathryn Hayward, a nursing professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

She’s referring to a community-based bank run by volunteers, like the one in Calgary, a version she says seems to avoid the higher costs and red tape of banks operating out of hospitals.

Hayward is part of a group that is trying to start a community milk bank in Halifax that would supply milk to all hospitals in the Atlantic. Although it’s a few years away from opening, it already has a name: Maritime Mothers’ Milk.

Decades ago, Halifax and about 22 other locations across the country had milk banks. But they all closed in the 1980s with the discovery and panic about HIV – all except for Vancouver’s bank, which has been operating steadily since 1974.

To read the rest of the story, visit The Globe and Mail online.