After a face-to-face interview and several rounds of blood tests, Wu Fangting (pseudonym), 26, officially became a donor to the breast milk bank at the Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center.

 

She was assigned serial number 452, meaning Wu is the center's 452nd donor. 

 

Each day, four or five women like Wu donate their healthy breast milk to the bank for free, which is able to feed five or six sick babies in the hospital. But it's not enough - a total of 90 sick babies in the hospital need breast milk every day, Liu Xihong, co-founder of the bank with the Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center, told the Health News, a newspaper under the National Health and Family Planning Commission. 

 

The Guangzhou center in South China's Guangdong Province established the mainland's first breast milk bank in March 2013, followed by medical centers in Jiangsu Province's Nanjing and Zhangjiagang. 

 

All of the banks are now challenged by the difficulty of attracting donors and seeking enough funds to maintain their operations. Meanwhile, an online market for breast milk is booming.

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