Bacteriological screening of expressed breast milk revealed a high rate of bacterial contamination in Chinese women

Microbial Contamination of Human Milk Purchased Via the Internet

“…A study of Chinese mothers with hospitalized infants may have had the greatest contamination previously reported, finding 86% of milk samples to have total counts .10 4 CFU/mL. 30 However, the highest total count reported was 1.86 3 10 6 CFU/mL, and Gramnegative counts did not exceed 10 3 CFU/ mL, significantly lower than here. A study of milk bank donations where women pooled milk over days revealed 61% of pools had Gram-negative rods; however, the degree of contamination was far lower than the current study.…”

Impact of pasteurization on the antibacterial properties of human milk

“…Between 60 and 80 % of samples of expressed human milk are contaminated with high amounts of skin contaminants, including coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS), alphahaemolytic streptococci and diphteroids [23,28], or pathogens such as cytomegalovirus or Escherichia coli [36], Serratia marcescens [13], Pseudomonas aeruginosa [14] or Klebsiella species [10].…”

Bacteria in Expressed Breastmilk from Mothers of Premature Infants and Maternal Hygienic Status

“…2 The extent of bacterial presence is variable even within the individual, and some have linked this to personal hygiene. 3 However, the definition is still dubious as to which and what extent of organisms present are considered pathogenic. Our group has previously detected bacterial contamination of EBM collected either using breast pumps or by manual expression at home without supervision that was temporally related with several outbreaks of NEC.…”