Donor milk safety
Donated human milk enables hospitals to nourish critically ill and premature infants
Prolacta donors reside in the U.S. and make an informed decision to donate their extra breast milk to help vulnerable infants. Each donor produces excess breast milk beyond what their own infant can consume.
These carefully screened donors collect, freeze, and ship their excess breast milk to Prolacta. That breast milk is processed into pasteurised 100% human milk–based nutritional products with essential minerals added for low-birth-weight premature infants.
How Prolacta human milk donors are qualified
We maintain the highest quality and safety standards in the human milk industry to protect the medically fragile infants we serve. This begins with our stringent qualification standards for donors.
Read more about our screening process.
Donors complete the qualification process and are educated on best practices for safely collecting and storing their breast milk before they are eligible to send donations. Their donated milk undergoes more than 20 tests for the screening of human milk to ensure quality and safety. Click here to view the complete screening, testing, and qualification criteria for each donation.
Leading the human milk industry in quality and safety
Hospitals choose Prolacta’s human milk–based nutritional products knowing that they are receiving safe, standardised donor milk products processed under the strictest quality and safety guidelines to protect the health and well-being of their most fragile patients.
Pasteurised, quality and safety-assured
All of our nutritional products are vat pasteurised to ensure the highest quality and safety, using time and temperature profiles defined by the U.S. FDA in its Pasteurised Milk Ordinance (PMO) to destroy pathogenic viruses and bacteria. While there are other pasteurisation and sterilisation processes used in the human milk banking industry,
Prolacta Bioscience chose vat pasteurisation because it provides effective pathogen inactivation while preserving important bioactive components in human milk.1,
2,Meredith-Dennis L, Xu G, Goonatilleke E, Lebrilla CB, Underwood MA, Smilowitz JT. Composition and variation of macronutrients, immune proteins, and human milk oligosaccharides in human milk from nonprofit and commercial milk banks. J Hum Lact. 2018;34(1):120-129. doi:10.1177/0890334417710635
3Lima HK, Wagner-Gillespie M, Perrin MT, Fogleman AD. Bacteria and bioactivity in Holder pasteurized and shelf-stable human milk products. Curr Dev Nutr. 2017;1(8):e001438. doi:10.3945/cdn.117.001438
Additionally, the majority of clinical data supports the benefits of using Prolacta’s vat pasteurisation process over alternative methods.
Citations
1, Liang N, Koh J, Kim BJ, Ozturk G, Barile D, Dallas DC. Structural and functional changes of bioactive proteins in donor human milk treated by vat-pasteurization, retort sterilization, ultra-high-temperature sterilization, freeze-thawing and homogenization. Front. Nutr. 2022. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2022.926814
2, Meredith-Dennis L, Xu G, Goonatilleke E, Lebrilla CB, Underwood MA, Smilowitz JT. Composition and variation of macronutrients, immune proteins, and human milk oligosaccharides in human milk from nonprofit and commercial milk banks. J Hum Lact. 2018;34(1):120-129. doi:10.1177/0890334417710635
3 Lima HK, Wagner-Gillespie M, Perrin MT, Fogleman AD. Bacteria and bioactivity in Holder pasteurized and shelf-stable human milk products. Curr Dev Nutr. 2017;1(8):e001438. doi:10.3945/cdn.117.001438