Saving Your Child’s Cord Blood Could Save Your Life!
By Camilla Gunnarson

Medical research has shown that a baby's own umbilical cord blood can be a life-saving source. The period immediately following the birth of a baby is a unique moment for parents to collect cord blood stem cells and save them for future use.
    
Umbilical cord blood stem cells are created during the development of a baby throughout pregnancy. These stem cells are readily found in the fetal circulation and umbilical cord. Therefore, at the time of delivery, parents can harvest, process, and store these cells. What was once routinely discarded and treated as waste can now be used as a valuable source of life-saving stem cells.

Today there are several types of stem cells available to us.  One is human embryonic stem cells that are taken from a human embryo during in vitro fertilization treatments. The human embryo is allowed to grow 5 to 7 days.  It is then broken apart and its cells removed and plated out in the laboratory, thereby creating an embryonic stem cell line. Through this process the embryo is destroyed.
    
Another source is adult stem cells that are taken from bone marrow. These can only be collected by a bone marrow biopsy, which is a long and painful procedure.  Often it is hard to find a suitable bone marrow donor because bone marrow transplantation requires a perfect HLA antigen match. The recipient will reject the donated bone marrow unless all six out of six HLA antigens are matched perfectly between the donor and recipient.
    
A further source is umbilical cord and placenta; also called adult stem cells. Like bone marrow, cord blood is a rich source of the baby’s own stem cells. Cord blood stem cells are a viable and useful alternative to bone marrow stem cells in reconstituting diseased or depleted bone marrow resulting from conditions such as leukemia, lymphoma, sickle cell anemia, and other life-threatening blood and immune disorders. Because umbilical cord stem cells are more universal in their potential, a perfect HLA antigen match is not needed for receiving donated umbilical cord blood stem cells: only a minimum of three of the six HLA antigens must match. This makes it much easier to find a donor.
    
One such recipient is Patrizia Durante of Montreal who was diagnosed in 2001 with leukemia when she was 27 weeks into her first pregnancy.  Prior to the delivery of her baby, Patrizia had the foresight to ask her doctors to collect her child’s umbilical cord blood. At thirty-one weeks gestation, a healthy baby girl, Victoria Angel was born. Her umbilical cord blood stem cells were collected, processed, and saved.  When all other treatment modalities had failed Patricia before, today she is alive and well. Victoria Angel's stem cells replenished her mother's bone marrow and cured her mother's leukemia. Little Victoria Angel saved her mother’s life. Victoria Angel and Patrizia's 'miracle' demonstrates how unique umbilical cord blood stem cells are.
    
There is increasing evidence that stem cells collected at birth can be directed to different cell lines such as neural tissue, liver cells, or cardiac muscle. These remarkable cells have been used thousands of times worldwide to successfully treat 45 different blood and immune system disorders. New research offers hope for future treatment of many other conditions such as Diabetes, Heart Disease, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer Disease.
    
The public appears to be unaware of the potential that these stem cells hold and that they have access to this kind of treatment option.  There are facilities around the world who store donated umbilical cord blood and make samples available to ill people anywhere in the world. Japan has developed an Umbilical Cord Blood Public Bank where cord blood is collected at most births, processed, and saved for citizens in need. A national registry lists all HLA samples on hand and ill people have access to them for their medical needs. The United States continues to invest a great deal of money to fund research using umbilical cord-blood stem cells. To date the Federal Government has not taken an active role in investing in this kind of treatment option.
    
But some researchers will not sit still waiting for Canadian politicians to catch up with this life-saving science. Currently there are three public umbilical cord blood banks in Canada: The Alberta Cord Blood Bank, Hema Quebec  and Toronto based, Victoria Angel Registry of Hope; the latter being named after Victoria Angel Durante.
    
None of these institutions receive any direct funding from the federal government.  Though the Alberta Cord Bank received a two-year grant of 1.2 million dollars under the Western Economic Partnership Agreement from the government of Alberta and the government of Canada in 1999, they have not received any federal funding since.  Hema Quebec received money for supplies through Health Canada but  no other federal funding. They do receive funding from the Quebec government. 
    
As governments and the private sector look to the future of health care, there should be more emphasis placed on ethical forms of stem cell research. Patients are not only being cured but the research is ethically sound. Polls consistently indicate that Canadians do not want their tax dollars wasted on ineffectual and unethical embryonic stem cell research. Investing in the establishment of a national inventory of cord blood stem cells would benefit all Canadians.
    
To find out more about cord blood registry, see: www.cellsforlife.com,  www.corcell.com,      www.stemcellresearch.org.