AUSTIN, Texas — Fort Cavazos opened the military’s first breast milk donation center this month to allow mothers to share their excess milk with patients across the country.
The newly opened Milk Depot operates in partnership with the Mothers’ Milk Bank at Austin — a nonprofit that has provided milk to the neonatal intensive care unit at Fort Cavazos for three years. The depot will save donors the hassle of transporting frozen milk to the next closest location about 30 minutes east in Temple.
Officials at Fort Cavazos and the milk bank said this is the first time a military base has opened a facility to collect donated milk.
Grace Wolford, a 23-year-old Army spouse with a 10-month-old son, said the opening of the Milk Depot has allowed her to donate more than 400 ounces of milk.
“I didn’t really always have a lot of time to be able to make the hour drive, and I didn’t have the equipment to be able to transport my milk and keep it frozen,” Wolford said.
“Having something that’s only like 10 to 15 minutes away made it 1,000 times easier.”
The milk bank transports the raw milk to its facilities an hour south in Austin and pasteurizes and screens it using standards created by the Human Milk Banking Association of North America, said Kim Updegrove, executive director of the Mothers’ Milk Bank at Austin and chairwoman of the association’s standards committee.
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