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Safety and handling

Human milk is a raw food, and almost everything that goes wrong with it is a handling problem rather than a milk problem. These are the controls, in the order they matter.

An open freezer drawer of flat frozen bags of milk
How long does breast milk keep?
The clocks in one table, and why the UK and US disagree
A woman putting bottles of expressed milk onto a fridge shelf, with the freezer drawer below packed with flat frozen bags
Is my milk still good?
The storage checker: pick the milk, the place, the hours
Milk bottles on a doorstep
How to ship breast milk
The cold chain, demystified in one packing list
A woman's hands writing the date on a filled bag of milk
Screening and testing
The five tests, what they cost, and what they don't prove
A smiling mother pouring milk from a bottle into a storage bag propped in a mug, her baby watching from a high chair
Pasteurising milk at home
A pan, a glass jar, ten minutes – what heat fixes and what it can't
Two women laughing together, each with a baby on her lap, mugs and toys on the rug
Buying breast milk safely
Vetting sellers, handling milk, dodging scams
Glass milk bottles and a jug on a scrubbed wooden kitchen table
Is buying breast milk safe?
The bacteria study everyone quotes, read properly

The research that frightens people about buying milk online measured anonymous sellers posting without coolant to a rented mailbox. It measured a venue. These guides are about what that venue was missing: a clock you can trust, a cold chain that holds, a seller with a name, and a pan of water for a second line of defence.

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Selling your milk Buying milk The law What's in the milk Oversupply and pumping All 31 guides

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