An official website of the United States government.
This research project will investigate recruitment of women for providing samples of breast milk, and associated record keeping, sampling, storage and analysis of samples.
<p>Health professionals will use various recruitment methods to obtain samples and investigate the relative success of different strategies and the impact of these on obtaining successive samples.
<p>The effect of different collection and storage methods on the levels of environmental contamination of samples such as metals, dioxins and PAHs will be investigated by a small programme of analyses.
Breast milk composition and the presence of contaminants can be affected by many factors such as the demographics of the mother providing the sample, dietary habits, environmental quality etc.
<p>Breast milk is a valuable indicator of long term exposure to contaminants by the mother and is also a source of exposure to contaminants for newborn babies and infants. Obtaining samples of breast milk is extremely difficult and this hampers the collection of representative data.
<p>This study investigated methods that would increase the chances of obtaining samples that might then be used to establish a breast milk archive.
<p>Find more about this project and other FSA food safety-related projects at the <a href="http://www.food.gov.uk/science/research/" target="_blank">Food Standards Agency Research webpage</a>.