Nonprofit milk bank helps premature and ill infants
Thursday, March 20, 2003
By Nina Garin
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
Daily Breeze

"Life inside Lucie Nicole’s incubator is pink and rosy. She has a soft blanket, a bright name tag and plenty of mother’s milk to nourish her tiny body. But the milk that Lucie drinks doesn’t come from her own mother. Because the 2-pound, 7-ounce Lucie was born three months early, her mother wasn’t able to produce any breast milk — a key ingredient in helping the development of premature babies. So the people at the Mothers’ Milk Depot of Southern California stepped in. The Mothers’ Milk Depot is a nonprofit organization based in San Jose that collects breast milk for babies such as Lucie, who normally wouldn’t be able to receive any. “Human milk is liquid gold for preterm infants,” says Dr. Nancy E. Wight, a neonatologist at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women in San Diego. “It provides nutrition, digestive enzymes, growth factors and hormones.”"