Banking on Milk

And there are businesses selling real milk for profit. Robert Feinstock, manager of Certified Household Staffing in Beverly Hills, Calif., matches wet nurses with mothers seeking milk. He says he started offering breast-feeders for hire in 2003 when he heard that some women with breast implants were having trouble nursing. The company's Web site features pictures of household help dressed in Victorian outfits and a list of services including cook, bodyguard, butler and wet nurse. The typical wet nurse in his registry (as with many temporary agencies, they are not officially employed by him) charges $1,000 per week, including the agency's fees. "A wet nurse is a viable entity," Feinstock says.

Even more-ambitious milk-sharing businesses are launching. Prolacta Bioscience, a biotechnology company and for-profit milk bank in Monrovia, Calif., began selling human milk last year. Prolacta provides the pasteurization process and then sells its milk to neonatal hospital units across the country. The price for Prolacta's milk runs between $100 and $250 a day for the milk it collects from unpaid donors, according to the company's chief executive, Scott Elster, for what the company describes as a fortified, concentrated form of milk. Prolacta is funded by well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and so far has raised $12 million in private investment, according to the company.

Elster signed on as CEO in October after working in the plasma division of Baxter International. He says there are many similarities between selling blood products and selling milk. "You have a clear liquid and a white liquid, but the business works the same way," Elster says. He says he intends his company to work as a complement to nonprofit milk banks, not to compete with them.

Jennifer Laycock, who started a Web site and blog at http://www.thelactivist.com a year ago to promote milk banks and breast-feeding, worries about the emergence of for-profit banks. "You get into a slippery slope introducing profit into the game," she says, noting that some mothers may be enticed into selling their milk for the right price and giving their own children formula.

By far the most difficult part of milk-sharing to track or quantify is the casual swapping of milk between moms. Lindsay Ogden of Fort Collins, Colo., has given milk to two moms she met in a breast-feeding support group who had trouble nursing. Among her friends, she says, it's common to nurse each others' babies while babysitting them and to experiment with the ways different children suck. Ogden says she wouldn't let just anyone nurse her baby. But "I have no problem with taking milk from a mama I know and trust," she says. "It's more common than the general public likes to think."

The Internet has become a catalyst for milk-sharing. Many moms are buying milk from one another online, Laycock says, with varying degrees of safety. Some pay for screening, others buy home-pasteurization kits. Still others just take a mom's word that her milk is good. Laycock recently gave a friend a few weeks' supply of her frozen milk, but then when midwives around her small town near Columbus, Ohio, called her for more, she felt uncomfortable. "They didn't know me from Adam," she says of the other mothers.

Laycock's milk odyssey began in 2005, when she had an oversupply for her first child and donated gallons of milk to the Ohio milk bank. It is, she says, simply what people did hundreds of years ago: Mothers helped one another. But the success of modern milk-sharing paired with the frontier-busting ways of the Internet are challenging modern safety standards.

"I wish there was a way to regulate it without shutting it down," Laycock says. "You want to encourage [sharing milk] but not to the extent of taking milk from strangers." ·

Shannon Henry, a former Washington Post staff writer, is a freelance writer and author living in Denver. Comments:health@washpost.com.