Writing to Fox News Digital on Friday, Sarah Adams, a pediatrician at Akron Children's Hospital in Ohio, warned that the homemade formula recipes that parents are reportedly increasingly turning to could be potentially fatal.
'I do NOT recommend making your own formula,' Adams wrote, ''The AAP [American Academy of Pediatrics] strongly advises against homemade formula.'
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' These [options] are unsafe and not FDA approved — infant deaths have been reported.' Despite her assertions, there have been no recent reports of deaths related to homemade baby formula.
As of April 24, CBS News reports that 40 to 50 percent of the top-selling baby formula products were out of stock at stores across the country, according to Datasembly, which tracked baby formula stock at over 11,000 retailers.
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National out-of-stock levels hiked nine percentage points from 31 to 40 percent between April 3 and April 24, per an analysis from Datasembly. Parents have been turning to homemade recipes found online to hold them over through the shortage, yet Adams and other authorities insist this practice is unsafe.
'Although feeding babies regular milk or making homemade formula was common decades ago, it is not a safe or recommended practice,' wrote Dr. Steven A. Abrams on Healthychildren.org, 'Formula mixtures made from online or other resources may not have vital components, such as enough iron or vitamins for a baby.'
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' Or, they may have too much salt or other nutrients that your baby's kidneys and liver cannot handle in large amounts.' In 2021, the FDA issued a warning against homemade formulas after several infants fed off of recipes were hospitalized with hypocalcemia, a deficiency of calcium in the blood that can cause seizures.
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' The FDA has stated that the agency does not recommend that consumers make infant formulas at home because of potentially very serious health concerns,' a spokesperson for the FDA said last year.
' It is not safe,' Dr. Lisa Gaw, a pediatrician with Texas Children's Urgent Care in Austin, told KXAN, Austin, after the FDA's warning, 'There's contamination leading to infection and illness risk. Then there is a risk that your child may not be getting everything that he or she needs.'
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'When they are this young, their bodies are still developing, and the way they process things is a little different than, say, a one-year-old toddler. Too little or too much of any nutrient, whether it's vitamin or mineral, can be harmful to an infant in the age group. They're still developing.'
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Experts have further warned against diluting formula or replacing it with cow's milk.
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Doing so is 'not nutritionally comparable with breast milk or infant formula,' declared Brian Dittmeier, senior director of public policy at the National WIC Association, and could cause nutrient deficiencies that can have a 'profound impact on an infant's growth and development.'
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He said parents struggling to find formula should contact their local WIC agencies and food banks for help locating some in their communities.
The advice comes as parents spend up to $800 on eBay for cans of baby formula that normally cost $50 and are canvasing stores across entire regions to track down the formula.
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We've called the WIC office,' Jill Bradford, a foster mother to a 5-month-old baby girl with medical needs, told WTVR, 'We've called Thrive, which is a supply company. We've called every hospital system in the state. I've contacted personally every Kroger, Walgreens, Walmart, and CVS within the tri-cities area.'
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