The South African Breast Milk Reserve has issued an urgent appeal to healthy mothers to donate breast milk, warning that current supplies are not enough to meet the growing needs of vulnerable newborns.
Founder and executive director Stasha Jordan said the organisation has about 1,500 units of donated milk in storage enough to last just one month, despite thousands of premature and critically ill babies depending on donor milk each year.
Jordan described donor breast milk as a lifeline for infants in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), particularly in cases where mothers are unable to breastfeed due to illness or complications during childbirth.
“Breast milk donations support very vulnerable babies at the beginning of the life cycle, when sometimes their own mothers pass away during labour,” she said. “It matters especially for very low birth weight babies that can only drink breast milk.”
She warned that feeding fragile newborns artificial formula can pose serious health risks.
“When babies weigh less than 1.8 kilograms, it is dangerous to feed them artificially because they are at risk of necrotising enterocolitis,” Jordan explained, referring to a potentially fatal intestinal condition that disproportionately affects premature infants.
The organisation relies entirely on volunteer donors and is urging more mothers with surplus milk to consider contributing, saying even small amounts can make a life-saving difference.
Similar initiatives have previously been trialled locally. Between 2014 and 2017, the UKZN Centre for Rural Health partnered with the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health to operate a human milk bank project in the province.
Jordan said expanding the donor base remains critical to ensuring that no baby goes without essential nutrition because, as she put it, for some newborns it is not just food, it is medicine.