ArticleMaternal & child nutrition2021
Maintaining human milk bank services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic: A global response.
Article in Maternal & child nutrition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- Policies and guidelines supporting the sustainability of human milk donation to milk banks in Switzerland: a document analysis.International journal for equity in health · 2025Pooled it
- A systematic review of contaminants in donor human milk.Maternal & child nutrition · 2024Pooled it
- Improving resilience in human milk banking: workshop proceedings, 11th November, London UK.BMC proceedings · 2026Article
- Human milk donation in Australia: a qualitative study of donors and potential donors.International breastfeeding journal · 2025Article
- A Framework for Evaluation of New Processing Technologies in Human Milk Banking.Comprehensive reviews in food science and food safety · 2025Review
- Bridging the Milk Gap: Integrating a Human Milk Bank-Blood Bank Model to Reinforce Lactation Support and Neonatal Care.Nutrients · 2025Article
- Views on wet nursing and expressing breastmilk for sharing and human milk bank donation among mothers in two parenting social media communities in Vietnam.Maternal & child nutrition · 2025Article
- The Unsung Heroes: The Profile of the Donor at a Southern Italian Milk Bank and Driving Factors in Human Milk Donation.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Disparities in being able to donate human milk impacts upon maternal wellbeing: Lessons for scaling up milk bank service provision.Maternal & child nutrition · 2024Article
- Donor and newborn profiles and their influence on donation volume and duration: a cross-sectional study in a Spanish human milk bank.International breastfeeding journal · 2024Article
- Conceptualizing the Commercialization of Human Milk: A Concept Analysis.Journal of human lactation : official journal of International Lactation Consultant Association · 2024Review
- Donation barriers, enablers, patterns and predictors of milk bank donors in the United States and United Kingdom.Maternal & child nutrition · 2024Article
- Nonprofit human milk banking: On a challenging path to global equity.Maternal & child nutrition · 2024Article
- Review of current best practices for human milk banking.Maternal & child nutrition · 2024Review
- The global status of human milk banking.Maternal & child nutrition · 2024Review
- Monitoring the Use of Human Milk, the Ideal Food for Very Low-Birth-Weight Infants-A Narrative Review.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Emergency response and preparedness among Polish human milk banks: a comparison of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis.Frontiers in nutrition · 2024Article
- Comparison between the for-profit human milk industry and nonprofit human milk banking: Time for regulation?Maternal & child nutrition · 2024Article
- Barriers and Facilitators for the Donation and Acceptance of Human Breast milk: A Scoping Review.Current nutrition reports · 2023Article
- Understanding the current and future usage of donor human milk in hospitals: An online survey of UK neonatal units.Maternal & child nutrition · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
20 authors at 15 institutions in 11 countries.
Funding
Abstract
If maternal milk is unavailable, the World Health Organization recommends that the first alternative should be pasteurised donor human milk (DHM). Human milk banks (HMBs) screen and recruit milk donors, and DHM principally feeds very low birth weight babies, reducing the risk of complications and supporting maternal breastfeeding where used alongside optimal lactation support. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a range of challenges to HMBs worldwide. This study aimed to understand the impacts of the pandemic on HMB services and develop initial guidance regarding risk limitation. A Virtual Collaborative Network (VCN) comprising over 80 HMB leaders from 36 countries was formed in March 2020 and included academics and nongovernmental organisations. Individual milk banks, national networks and regional associations submitted data regarding the number of HMBs, volume of DHM produced and number of recipients in each global region. Estimates were calculated in the context of missing or incomplete data. Through open-ended questioning, the experiences of milk banks from each country in the first 2 months of the pandemic were collected and major themes identified. According to data collected from 446 individual HMBs, more than 800,000 infants receive DHM worldwide each year. Seven pandemic-related specific vulnerabilities to service provision were identified, including sufficient donors, prescreening disruption, DHM availability, logistics, communication, safe handling and contingency planning, which were highly context-dependent. The VCN now plans a formal consensus approach to the optimal response of HMBs to new pathogens using crowdsourced data, enabling the benchmarking of future strategies to support DHM access and neonatal health in future emergencies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.