Ordinary Aussie mums are making these trades in secret.

Jemina’s newborn son was failing to put on weight.

Like any new mum she was starting to get concerned. The solution from her lactation consultant was clear, increase his milk feeds, but Jemina’s own breast milk supply couldn’t meet her baby’s demand.

For many women the answer would have been simple: Millions of babies take formula every day. It’s safe, it’s easy, it’s healthy.

It’s a good choice.

And whilst medical professionals across the world support all sorts of choices, from formula to breast for infant feeding and each mother and baby is different, Jemima was adamant that breastfeeding was for her. 

She went searching for options, and the search led her to a community of thousands of wet nurses, all willing to feed Jemima’s son for her with their own breast milk.

“Sharing breast milk has been going on for centuries across many cultures. It just seemed like the natural and logical thing to do” Jemima told Mamamia.

It’s a growing online phenomenon: the traditional practice of wet-nursing making a comeback in the digital world. When you go online searching the ads can seem quite unusual…..

”I am super diet conscious 100% dairy free momma. My milk is also free of antibiotics and hormones from chicken, beef, and pork. Paypal only. No Adult Wet Nursing” says one.

“I am a healthy, active, no drugs, no disease. I will not pump in front of you or send you pictures, you may wait while I pump in your vehicle outside if you’re wanting 10 oz fresh warm milk.” says another advertisement.

In the US you can sell your excess milk for up to $5 an ounce; some women boast of making up to US$3000 a month. And when you consider the average baby drinks up to 25 ounces a day you can see why it’s a cottage industry growing in popularity.

Here in Australia the distribution of human breast milk is a little murkier.

Mums connect with each other via Facebook, then the normal process is to meet up, or chat via Skype. Often a sum is agreed upon or simply just reimbursement for items used like storage bags.

While, in Australia, it’s technically illegal to trade in human body parts (of which breast milk is classified), many parents told Mamamia that milk sharing does happen underground.

For Queensland mum, Yuliya it’s a purely above ground transaction, and one that she does literally out of the goodness of her heart. She regularly provides her own breast milk for other Mums to feed their babies.

The reasons she does it are simple. “There but for the grace of God go I” she thinks.

Yuliya’s first labour didn’t go according to plan. Her newborn son was placed in intensive care where he was fed expressed milk and formula through a nasal tube. This wasn’t what she’d wanted or planned, though like all new Mums she did what it took to keep her baby alive.

Two years later she was pregnant again and this time she decided if it happened again she was going to use donated breast milk. This time things did go as plan, and she was able to breastfeed her second son straight away. But she found she was producing more milk than she needed so she decided to donate her milk.

Yuliya says that she is happy to help others in need but she does have some concerns over the consequences of donating milk. “It is mostly about my responsibility for any negative outcomes. While I know that I am healthy and my milk should do more good than harm, there are potential issues with the safety of this milk due to storage and transportation.”

Another Mum who donates her milk to the site  (and wished to remain anonymous) said that she too has concerns over the safety of her milk, “ I worry that I’m somehow letting germs in to the milk.”

Meg Nagle, ”The Milk Meg” is a lactation consultant (www.themilkmeg.com) who has helped thousands of women feed their babies with their own, or donated breast milk.

Meg told Mamamia that she sees many women in Australia using donated milk whom have no other choice, “women with health issues or if she is undergoing chemotherapy, surgery where breastfeeding must be stopped, or a mother who has adopted a baby.” she said.

But new concerns have rocked the breast milk-sharing world when the journal Pediatrics released a study last week showing unpasteurized human milk purchased online was found to contain harmful bacteria.

Of the 101 human milk samples collected for the study, 63 percent tested positive for staphylococcus, 36 percent contained streptococcus, and 3 percent had traces of salmonella.

Meg Nagle says that the Pediatrics study was misleading, especially for Australian mothers. “This study was poorly designed. “ she said.

“Half of the samples took more than two days to ship and 19% of them were not cooled when shipped.  These researchers have no idea how the milk was collected, if it was even 100% breast milk.”

The web site Nurshable.com further questions the way the milk in this study was shipped “Would you drink a baggie of cows milk from the grocery store that had been shipped two days ago without ice? “ they ask.

Emma Kwansica, a breastfeeding advocate who founded the Facebook group Human Milk for Human Babies, worries that the study will be used “to demonize the whole process of community milk sharing.” She told Bloomberg Businessweek if the Pediatrics study is accurate, why then hasn’t been a rise in infections and diseases among infants. “If babies were getting sick from this, trust me, I’d be the first to know,” she says.

She in fact, feels that perhaps the milk bought for the study wasn’t intended for infants at all but instead for the legions of breast milk fetish adult men who also buy off such sites.

For Meg Nagle studies like this distract from the importance of spreading the breastfeeding message. She says that what we should be doing is “not criticizing or arguing with others about the importance of it, but simply breastfeeding our babies.”

Would you ever use another mother’s breast milk? Would you consider donating or selling (if it were legal) your own breast milk?