Dali, Fountain of Milk....

Some years ago I saw a Dali exhibit and was entranced by his art and what I perceived to be a visionary perception of the future. I was particularly struck by his "Fountain of Milk Spreading Itself Uselessly on Three Shoes." This is dated 1945.

Are we there, yet?? Woman, on a pedestal, allowing her milk to fall to earth. No baby in sight. Barren landscape, except one man standing by a shoe.....

Jamming

Well what do you know, my computer keyboard jammed and I couldn't go forward or backward, couldn't do anything. These computer viruses, sure get around town.

Okay, so lets see, if it will let me continue or totally shut me down.

I was writing that Dr. Lisa Amir was involved with a milk bank in Geelong, Australia. see

http://www.gsdm.com.au/newsletters/deakin/june09/7.html

If you want to read the article on milk banks that I commented on see

http://www.internationalbreastfeedingjournal.com/

What do you think? What should I think? Should I believe that all this mess was accidental? Yeah, sure, give me a break. The push to sell milk banking down our throats has just begun. Who wins? Yeah--researchers cause they get a resource easily and free to do research on. Corporations win, cause they get a product to develop and sell to consumers and yeah its free to patent and monopolize. Who loses? Well, just mothers and babies. Mothers cause they will be sabotaged into believing that the product is just as good as breastfeeding. And babies who will be denied access to the breast because the mother believes the world of "medical research."

I was amused reading Lactnet and the hoopala regarding the media article on the rotovirus vaccine and breastfeeding. People still don't get it. The rotovirus vaccine is derived from research done on human milk components, genetically engineered, and then sold to our medical community. And yes, this will directly sabotage breastfeeding. It's the money, guys, wake up!! We don't need the freakin vaccine, if women would exclusively breastfeed. But we can't have that can we?? So thank your milk banks for their generosity to researchers around the world!! Yes, feel the heat. Who controls what research gets printed? Editors....and don't tell me about how fair-handed they are regarding what gets printed and what doesn't. Where is truth? Obviously lost forever, because who controls what is printed/what is believed controls human life and activity. The earth is bleeding, we see that in the Gulf. But the lifeblood of mammalian survival is like that geyser of oil in the Gulf. Steadily leaking into a lab filled with empire builders, who care not if women breastfeed. Like the Gulf oil crisis, the care is only about profit.

Copyright 2010 Valerie W. McClain

The Nitty-Gritty

I really, really thought that once I wrote about the situation with the International Breastfeeding Journal, that I could move forward. Nope.

I decided something didn't ring true, something just ain't right. The editor of this Journal is Dr. Lisa Amir, who is also a researcher from Australia. Why was her response so strange (in my mind) to this article on milk banks. My alarm bells were ringing in my head. She didn't seem to understand that just making a name change (from breastfeeding to breast milk feeding) in the conclusion did not correct the essential problem with this paper.

Well, I did a little search and found that Dr. Lisa Amir is involved with a milk bank in Geelong, Australia.

Copyright 2010 Valerie W. McClain

Time Out--online free journals

I will continue the tale of the company, Ventria Bioscience tomorrow or the next day. Within days of writing about Ventria Bioscience in my blog, Ventria withdrew their FDA GRAS notice for lactoferrin and lysozyme. Should we presume that this is the end of it? Will the company go on to other endeavors? Or are they just changing strategy? I read that a company does not necessarily need GRAS to market a product. So who knows what this company will do in this game-playing world. There has been a huge investment. But I leave that tale for next time.
Instead I want to introduce a new concept in the world of free online publication of medical research. It's called change the text, change a table after publication. "Now ya see it, now ya don't."
In March of this year, I read an article online called, "Does opening a milk bank in a neonatal unit change infant feeding practices? A before and after study" in the International Breastfeeding Journal. I read alot of their articles because its free (can't afford medical journal subscription prices). And I comment on some of the articles. I wanted to read this article because this was the second article on milk banking in a professional journal in a month. The other article was authored by people involved in the HMBANA milk bank in San Jose. This article was authored by researchers in Spain--Torres et al. I read the article and thought it was poorly done. They defined exclusive breastfeeding as equivalent to exclusive breastmilk feeding. Then concluded, "We demonstrate how milk banks do not cause reduction in the rates of breastfeeding or in promoting its protection and support." Study never showed that milk banks did not cause a reduction of breastfeeding (the act of suckling an infant). Their research seemed to show that infant formula usage was decreased by the use of donor milk. Breastfeeding and breastmilk feeding are not equivalent. We may "feel" the need to support mothers who pump their milk and never get the baby to the breast. But scientifically, breastfeeding and breastmilk feeding are two very different modes of feeding an infant. In fact the use of technology to collect breastmilk creates change in the product (fat content). It is similiar to the difference between kneading bread made from whole ingredients and using a bread machine using the same ingredients. There is a taste difference, even a texture difference. Machinery saves time, but it creates it own problems.
So I wrote a comment regarding this study and it was published. Some weeks later I went back to reread the article because I was going to write about it in this blog. And I became thoroughly confused. The text had changed making my comment appear totally bizarre. In fact the whole article seemed different. If I hadn't quoted from the text of the article in my comment, I would have thought I lost my mind. Yeah, I know alot of people think I have lost my marbles. I realized at the very least the sentence had changed since I had made my comment. So I wrote the editor about the changes made to the conclusion of this study. I was concerned that changes were made without readers knowing that changes were made. The editor wrote me back and stated that changes had been made by the authors to correct a Table error and while they were making those changes they changed the sentence. The editor stated that a comment would be made to reflect that changes had been made. I wrote back to the editor asking which Table was changed. The response was that the change was a number change not related to the feeding data. But I was not told which Table was changed. There were other issues. The significance of this, seems huge to me. How easily our technology can be used to change perceptions. If I hadn't quoted from the text, I would have thought I had lost my mind. If I had let it pass and not written the editor, readers would have presumed that Valerie W. McClain was a nitwit. Of course, now I look at online professional journals in a different light. What might be changed? Is it the same text as yesterday, will it be the same tomorrow? Trust in print....god save of us.

The Birth of the Milky Way Empire

"A long time ago in a galaxy far far away....Mary Alactivst was one of the last of her kind. She was breastfed by her mother, an oddity for sure because the Empire considered breastfeeding revolting, disgusting, on the level of the Primitives. Mary's mother kept to herself, never nursing in public because she did not want to attract the attention of the Elites. The Elites were the movers and shakers of society. They governed the Empire. They owned the lands, the money system, and approved or disapproved who was allowed to be schooled in the Ways of the Empire. Survival was difficult if not impossible without their approval. There were those who lived on the fringes of society who risked their lives to be one of the Free. Mary's mother was one of the Free."

Freedom. Yesterday, an anole, a common lizard in Florida, hitched a ride on the hood of my truck. I didn't see him until I was moving down the rode. He hunkered down and clung to the hood. I was in heavy traffic, no place to stop. I said to him, "Hang on Buddy, I'll stop as soon as I can." He seemed to hear me and clung on despite the difficulty. I found a park and stopped by a tree. I jumped out of the truck and gave him a nudge to jump off my truck. He jumped. He jumped on me, which I really didn't expect. I jumped and he jumped off me and ran under my truck. I got back in my truck and very carefully pulled away not wanting to run over the guy I just saved. As I drove away, Mr. Crow flew down, and the chase was on. "Run Buddy, run!" Mr. Crow won. I saved Buddy so that Mr Crow could eat. Destiny.

Well what does that have to do with our saga about genetically engineering human milk components in plants? It's all about human Destiny. Now for a dose of the reality of our Biotech World. I'd like to introduce to you a company called Ventria Bioscience. This is the company that has sowed fields of rice with the genes for human milk components: lysozyme and lactoferrin. These components will be extracted from the rice plants (or barley or wheat-patent suggests a variety of plants but for now they are using rice) to be used in oral rehydration solutions and infant formulas. Ventria Bioscience was founded by Raymond Rodriguez in 1993. Professor Rodriguez is a professor at UC Davis and also Chairman and CEO of the Davis Bioscience Group. The current President and CEO of Ventria is Scott E. Deeter. Ventria planted their experimental fields in California first but were chased out by various concerns. They then had plans to plant their pharmaceutical crop in Missouri But Anheuser-Busch and Riceland Foods were concerned about contamination from this unusal crop with their supplies of rice. They ended up with their experimental fields in North Carolina and Kansas. Currently, both their lysozyme and lactoferrin ingredients are going through the FDA GRAS process (GRAS notices 191 and 235). GRAS for both these items is "pending." I found the GRAS letters written by this company to the FDA highly enlightening.

The use of evidence (scientific research) for its GRAS status is referenced by the DARLING Study. The DARLING Study is well-known among IBCLCs. Fascinating that the safety of genetically engineered human milk components is based partly on studies on human milk. Of course the FDA belief that gentically engineered organisms are equivalent to the real thing has alot to do with using this as evidence of safety. "The protective effects of breast feeding against infection, in a relatively affluent population, first year of life incidence of diarrheal illness in breast fed infants half that of formula. Dewey et al 1995") Evidence-based medicine. Sort of ironic that the safety of genetically engineering human milk components is based on the safety of breastfeeding. The safety that mothers aren't aware of because no one discusses risks of infant formula. Stay tuned for more on Recombinant Times....

Copyright 2010 Valerie W. McClain

Rummage Sale: the connect between milk banks and the infant formula industry

The community of breastfeeding advocates accepts that non-profit milk banks gift/or sell their donor milk to projects that involve the infant formula industry. Is this correct? Is it acceptance or they just don't know or just don't care? I can't stop thinking about the relationship of a HMBANA milk bank-San Jose, CA and the UC Davis Milk Bioactives Consortium. So who cares? There is a bleakness and vast empty ethical space that seems to envelope a profession that is supposedly dedicated to helping mothers breastfeed. So the other angle is to help the infant formula industry/academia/US Government make a better infant formula? I now understand why the WHO Code is considered irrelevant in the USA. One can understand the recent research papers funded by milk banks that try to prove that milk sharing between mothers is risky. Or that using donor milk does not impact rates of breastfeeding among preterm mothers. Both papers written with major flaws but useful in building consensus among non-reading professionals. The goal is to monopolize the use of human milk, to make it illegal for moms to share milk. Patent related? You bet. The latest HMBANA Conference had researchers featured that own patents and patent applications on human milk components. This is not unusual--every HMBANA Conference seems to feature at least one researcher who has a patent or patent application on a human milk component. Are attendees to these Conferences informed of this? And do they even care? I guess all that matters is Business and this is the pervasive theme in the USA. To hell with ethics. What women don't know is their own fault. The recent Haiti fiasco to drum up donations for milk banks is a curiosity. So like the infant formula industry and its social marketing games.
The silence rains down and the Business of Breastfeeding grinds-on; building Empires for the makers of a "SAFER" infant formula, just like mom's milk.
Copyright 2010 Valerie W. McClain

The Milky Way Galactic Empire Report: an introduction

"A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...."

Our heroine, Mary Alactivst, stood in a field of rice owned by a national biotech company. Rice, who would have thought we were related. She stared closely at the field. They have my genes, my genetic blueprint for making milk for my babies. Mary quietly sang a lullaby. These are her babies, her rice babies. Singing to them will help them grow. Grow and feed the starving and sick babies around the world, because women can no longer breastfeed. They have forgotten how. But now we will save the planet. Mothers around the world will be so grateful. And so begins the sad saga of the Milky Way Empire and the Second Invasion of the Clones.

Yes, just a parody on a science fiction movie. But the reality of biotechnology is that we are mixing human genes with animals and plants. How is this happening? Why do I believe that this inventing will ultimately destroy breastfeeding? Stay Tuned. First, let's look at a 2008 Annual Report from the California Dairy Research Foundation (CDRF which discusses the UC Davis Milk Bioactives Consortium. The document states that, "the Consortium is a public-private partnership with over $12M in funding...aimed at discovering compounds in bovine and human milk with proven nutritional benefits for human health." Funding was derived from several commodity groups, governmental agencies, and multinational companies with initial funding from the CDRF and UC Davis Discovery Program. Under 2004-2005 the Milk Bioactives Consortium states,"Relationships with the Milk Bank of San Jose, CA and Reno, NV established to provide supply of human milk for analysis."

nefits for human health."

Does this document mean the HMBANA milk bank at San Jose? Or are there other milk banks in San Jose? In 2007 they raise over $2.7 million from various agencies plus first industrial partnership with DSM Food Ingredients (DSM-Dutch State Mines, provides ARA for Martek oils). In 2008 the NIH provides a $3million award to study the effect of milk oligosaccharides and probiotics to decrease NEC in premature babies. Same year Nestle gives a multi-year donation to the Consortium. Page 7 of the document states, "ProLacta Biosciences and the Milk Bioactives program partner to secure supplies of human milk to mine for future bioactive components."

http://www.cdrf.org/doc/Research/CDRF2009Annual.pdf

I call this a fusion of interests in human milk components: industry, US Government, and academia-particularly UC Davis. And this fusion of interest seems to be mining human milk that is provided by milk banks--one milk bank being commercial. Do women who donate fully understand that their donations are part of a huge multi-million project to mine human milk components for use in commercial projects? What is the relationship between this huge project and other endeavors at UC Davis, such as the JHL, or Ventria Bioscience and its gmo rice containing the human genes lysozyme and lactoferrin? Science fiction? This is freaking scary. I was kicked off Lactnet in and around 2004-2005, coincidence? Discussions of human milk component patenting silenced, coincidence? Interesting........

Copyright 2010 Valerie W. McClain