Cord Blood Banking

Blood Cord Investing in Your Baby’s Future

We all know that blood saves lives, and most of us are familiar
with the importance of donating blood when and if we can. As
medical science has progressed, however, the ways in which blood
can be donated, and even the types of blood it is possible to
share, have increased, bringing with them a number of issues
that society must debate.

All cultures have their own traditions surrounding the process
of giving birth, and some of these involve the placenta and
umbilical cord, used to allow the transfer of substances between
mother and child before birth takes place. While some cultures
espouse the ingestion of a mother’s placenta, western medicine
has found another use for this organ, or at least for what is
contained within.

The placenta and umbilical cord contain a type of blood that is
rich with stem cells, which can be used to great benefit in
patients suffering from a variety of immune disorders. The most
widely known use of such cells is in bone marrow transplants,
where patients suffering from cancer receive the bone marrow
from a living donor, replacing the unhealthy blood cells of the
patient for the life-saving ones of the voluntary donor. The
process of bone marrow transplantation can, however, be time
consuming, and finding an exact donor match can be difficult.

Cord blood contains a similar type of the stem cells that are
found in bone marrow, but the way in which it is donated makes
it more readily available for the patient in need. Cord blood,
once tested for its suitability, can be stored in a special
facility until it is needed - when it can be sent directly to
the patient without enduring the time consuming search for a
bone marrow donor.

Cord blood donation raises a number of issues. Public cord blood
storage units are not always available to the parents who wish
to donate their baby’s blood. While parents can choose to store
the cord blood privately for their baby’s later use, this can be
expensive, and raises the question of whether the blood should
wait for someone who might never use it or be given immediately
to a patient in need.

For the moment, this remains the choice of the parents, who can
choose to save their baby’s cord blood, if they can afford to
pay the price. Like all insurance policies, it might be one
taken out with the hope that it never needs to be called in, but
society continues to ask whether this is a policy whose benefits
should be shared

About the author:
Dave is the owner of http://www.cord-blood-services.info and
http://www.cord-blood-research.info websites providing
information on umbilical cord blood