Adult craze for human breast milk purchased online poses serious health risks
2015-06-18
(Press-News.org) The recent craze for human breast milk amongst certain fitness communities, fetishists and chronic disease sufferers is ill advised say the authors of an editorial published today by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. There is a lucrative online market for adult buyers of human breast milk, with websites and forums describing it as a 'clean' super food that can lead to gains in the gym, and even help with erectile dysfunction and cancer. There are claims that it is more digestible and contains positive immune building properties. The authors, led by Dr Sarah Steele, of the Global Health and Policy Unit, Queen Mary University of London, write that these purported benefits do not stand up clinically and raw human milk purchased online or in an unpasteurised state poses many risks.
"Nutritionally there is less protein in breast milk than other milks like cow's milk," said Dr Steele. She and her colleagues write that the benefits of breast milk are being found in the lab, not in drinking a bottle ordered online. "Potential buyers should be made aware that no scientific study evidences that direct adult consumption of human milk for medicinal properties offers anything more than a placebo effect, said Dr Steele. The authors warn that human milk is potentially very hazardous if used to replace a healthy balanced diet.
Failure of women to sanitise properly when expressing milk, the failure to sterilise equipment properly, and the improper or prolonged storage and transportation of milk can expose consumers to bacterial food-borne illnesses like any other raw milk.
The lack of pasteurisation and testing not only indicates a bacterial risk but also exposes consumers to a host of infectious diseases, including hepatitis, HIV and syphilis. "While many online mums claim they have been tested for viruses during pregnancy, many do not realise that serological screening needs to be undertaken regularly," said Dr Steele. "Sexual and other activities in the postpartum period may expose the woman expressing to viruses that they may unwittingly pass on to consumers of the milk."
The authors call for health professionals and regulators to issue public guidance against the purchasing of human milk from Internet sources for adult as well as infant feeding.
INFORMATION:
Notes to editors
More than a lucrative liquid: the risks for adult consumers of human breast milk bought from the online market (DOI: 10.1177/0141076815588539) by Sarah Steele, Jens Foell, Jeanine Martyn and Andreas Freitag will be published by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine at 00:05hrs (UK time) on Thursday 18 June 2015 and can be read here.
For further information please contact:
Rosalind Dewar
Media Office, Royal Society of Medicine
DL +44 (0) 1580 764713
M +44 (0) 7785 182732
E media@rsm.ac.uk
Dr Sarah Steele
Global Health and Policy Unit, Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry
Queen Mary University of London
M +44 (0) 7768 653130
E s.steele@qmul.ac.uk
T: @drsarahsteele
The JRSM is the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and is published by SAGE. It has full editorial independence from the RSM. It has been published continuously since 1809. Its Editor is Dr Kamran Abbasi.
SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. An independent company, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. http://www.sagepublications.com
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-06-18
Partnerships with multinational companies in child health programmes can work to help save lives, write the co-founders of charity ColaLife in The BMJ this week. But an academic argues that connections between multinational companies and child health projects present an ethical minefield.
ColaLife, a charity formed by British couple Simon and Jane Berry, worked with Coca-Cola to learn about the distribution channels the company uses in developing countries. With this knowledge, they devised a system to ensure life saving treatments reach children with diarrhoea in remote ...
2015-06-18
Up to 22 percent of surgical patients experience unexpected complications and must be readmitted for post-operative care. A study led by the University of Utah suggests that returning to the same hospital is important for recovery. Readmission to a different hospital was associated with a 26 percent increased risk for dying within 90 days.
The results, published in The Lancet, have implications for patients who take part in domestic medical tourism programs.
Some of the nation's largest businesses encourage employees to travel to large U.S. medical centers for complex ...
2015-06-18
Patients rehospitalized with complications after major surgery are 26% more likely to survive if they return to the hospital where they had their operation compared to those readmitted to a different hospital, according to a national study involving over 9 million Medicare patients in the USA, published in The Lancet.
The findings stand in contrast to current health policies that aim to regionalise major surgical procedures into high volume centres of excellence.
"With up to one in four patients rehospitalized following complex surgery, our results could potentially ...
2015-06-18
In The BMJ this week, two doctors criticize Australia for passing legislation that may be used to silence doctors working with asylum seekers.
The Border Force Act 2015 says that from July 2015 contracted workers including doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals face a prison sentence of up to two years for blowing the whistle on substandard medical care given to asylum seekers in detention centres.
Dr. David Berger at Broome Hospital in Western Australia, argues that the only reason to suppress doctors in this way, 'is to avoid embarrassing revelations ...
2015-06-18
Two Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) physicians who participated in the international response to the major earthquakes that hit Nepal in April and May each describe their experiences in Perspectives articles receiving Online First publication today in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Renee Salas, MD, MS, was already in Nepal working at a Himalayan Rescue Association clinic in the remote village of Pheriche when the first 7.8 magnitude quake struck on April 25. As she describes in her article "Humanity, Teamwork and Art in Post-Earthquake Nepal," while the immediate ...
2015-06-18
WHAT:
Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have identified a new immune disorder--DOCK2 deficiency--named after the mutated gene responsible for the disease. An international team of collaborators studied five children, four boys and one girl, from different ethnic backgrounds who had experienced debilitating infections early in life. The children were diagnosed with combined immunodeficiency (CID), which refers to a group of inherited disorders distinguished by defects in immune system cells called T cells. CIDs also may affect other cells of ...
2015-06-17
WASHINGTON, June 17 --- The value of the tax exemption provided to non-profit private hospitals in return for 'charity care and community benefit' nearly doubled over a nine-year period, climbing from an estimated $12.6 billion in 2002 to $24.6 billion dollars by 2011, according to a study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and led by researchers at Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) at the George Washington University.
This growth in the value of the tax exemption underscores taxpayer interest in how hospitals allocate their community ...
2015-06-17
MAYWOOD, Ill. - A genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis (NF) causes benign tumors to grow on the brain, spinal cord, and other parts of the nervous system.
There are no effective drugs to prevent or reverse NF. But increasing scientific knowledge has allowed for better clinical management and fewer complications, resulting in a higher quality of life for neurofibromatosis patients, NF specialists report in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences.
Pediatric neurologist and NF specialist Nikolas Mata-Machado, MD, of Loyola University Medical Center, ...
2015-06-17
Like homing pigeons, humans have a nose for navigation because our brains are wired to convert smells into spatial information, new research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows.
While humans may lack the scent-tracking sophistication of, say, a search-and-rescue dog, we can sniff our way, blindfolded, toward a location whose scent we've smelled only once before, according to the UC Berkeley study published today (June 17) in the journal PLOS ONE.
Similar investigations have been conducted on birds and rodents, but this is the first time smell-based navigation ...
2015-06-17
(New York, June 17, 2015) Melanoma patients with high levels of a protein that controls the expression of pro-growth genes are less likely to survive, according to a study led by researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published online in the journal Molecular Cell.
The research team found that the protein, called H2A.Z.2, promotes the abnormal growth seen in melanoma cells as they develop into difficult-to-treat tumors. H2A.Z.2 is part of the chromosome structure that packages genes, and has the ability to switch them on off. Having high levels of ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Adult craze for human breast milk purchased online poses serious health risks
