Le Figaro Bordeaux
Giving part of your mother's milk to help a child you don't know is what many women are already doing, allowing the teams at the Bordeaux lactarium to collect 18,000 liters of milk a year, in order to redistribute it to premature infants and infants suffering from certain pathologies.
By 2024, the donations from these volunteer mothers will be sent to a new place, in Pessac (Gironde) to be pasteurized, freeze-dried and redistributed.
After joining the Bordeaux University Hospital in 2012, the new site of the Raymond Fourcade lactarium at the Haut-Lévêque hospital was unveiled on Monday.
This project, which represents an investment of more than 8 million euros, largely provided by the State, should lead to the opening of the doors of the new milk bank in 2024. Equipped with new generation equipment, it will help to "
consolidate the place of the CHU of Bordeaux as the most important milk bank at the national level
", welcomes Yann Bubien, general manager of the CHU of Bordeaux, by allowing the team of the establishment to exercise "
the same activity, but in new premises, with new equipment
.
“A place of kindness”
Created by doctor Raymond Fourcade and inaugurated in Marmande (Lot-et-Garonne) in 1978 by Simone Veil, this milk bank has the particularity of having been the first to carry out, in addition to the pasteurization of milk, its freeze-drying.
Reduced to powder, the milk can thus be kept three times longer (18 months).
Half of the breast milk collected by the Bordeaux University Hospital is freeze-dried.
Pascale Pavone, first deputy mayor of Pessac, present at the inauguration, recalls her experience, as the mother of premature twins, of the "
place of benevolence and guilt-freeing
" that the milk bank was for her.
Praising this "
solidarity between mothers
", sometimes confronted with an "
arrival on earth which is not as simple as it should be
", the elected official underlines "
the essential wealth
" of breast milk, necessary for the feeding the tens of thousands of premature babies who are born every year in France.
For Professor Nicolas Grenier, president of the establishment's medical commission, this future structure will be able to "
give new impetus to this production
".
This establishment will also aim to build up stocks in order to be able to help other milk banks in France in the event of a shortage of breast milk.
Currently, the milk processed in the lactarium of the Bordeaux University Hospital is mainly intended for children from overseas territories.
