At Necker Hospital, in the “mother’s milk” factory to save premature babies

It's a unit without patients, but vital for the newborns cared for in the neonatology and neonatal intensive care unit at Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris. In the first basement of the Laennec building, in the milk bank, 12,000 liters of "mother's milk" pass through the system each year. Distributed along corridors with tired pastel walls, a dozen rooms house the stages of processing this "lactarium milk" intended for the very, very, and extremely premature babies at Necker and similar units in the Île-de-France region.

The milk from the donors, which arrives frozen, is quarantined while a blood test is carried out on these women. Then poured by masked operators, gloved and wearing pale yellow gowns into transparent plastic carboys, the milk is weighed, then pasteurized in small bottles using a method (heating to 60.5°C then ultra-high freezing) that preserves its anti-infectious properties while destroying a maximum number of germs (including Bacillus and cytomegalovirus, the most dangerous for premature babies). This is followed by a second stay of forty-eight hours in large freezers, awaiting the results of the bacteriological analysis. Ten percent of the milk is discarded after these first steps.

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