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Life-Saving Cord Blood Deserves its Own National Bank
LAURA BILLINGS
St. Paul Pioneer Press
26 May 2005
In my growing experience as a parent of small children, I can recommend a few items budget-conscious moms and dads can cross off the new baby shopping lists.
If you already own a washer and dryer that rumble, you can save yourself the 50 bucks you'd spend on one of those vibrating baby hammocks.
Neither is there any need to invest in one of those space-age diaper odor containment systems. (There's nothing yet known to man that can contain that smell entirely.)
And, thanks to a new bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives this week, it's probably safe to put the few thousand dollars you considered spending on that private cord-blood storage service for your kid into her college savings fund instead.
Someday soon, we might have a national bank for these life-restoring stem cells, which could raise the rates of survival for cancer and blood-disease patients across the country.
In a welcome show of reason, House members made two smart decisions on the future of stem-cell research. First, they ignored President Bush's threatened veto when they voted to expand federal funding to allow research on embryonic stem cells originally created for fertility treatments and donated by patients.
Second, they passed a bill that would put $79 million in federal funding toward collecting umbilical cord blood and creating a National Cord Blood Stem Cell Bank Network where the blood could be stored, distributed and studied. The remarkably uncontroversial bill ˜ supported by a 431-1 vote ˜ couldn't be betterter timed.
Just last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study from researchers at Duke University that found that infants suffering from Krabbe's disease ˜ a fatal ennzyme disorder that causes blindness, deafness, and cognitive deterioration ˜ were saved and brain development waas restored after receiving stem cells from the umbilical cords of healthy newborns.
Stem cells drawn from cord blood haven't proven nearly as versatile as embryonic stem cells. Still, when they're injected into the veins of cancer or blood-disease patients, these stem cells will migrate to the bone marrow, where they set up a sort of blood detox factory, replacing diseased blood with healthy blood.
Although the Institute of Medicine recently estimated that nearly 12,000 Americans with such diseases as leukemia and sickle cell anemia could be treated with donated cord blood, the four to six ounces of blood in the placenta and umbilical cord of every newborn is still largely treated as medical waste.
Fortunately, Minnesota has three hospitals that collect umbilical cord blood for the American Red Cross ˜ Fairview University iin Minneapolis, Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, and Immanuel St. Joseph's in Mankato. New parents are nearly as receptive to cord-blood donation as members of Congress. At Fairview, which began its cord-blood donation program in 1999, 92 percent of expectant mothers approached about donating their new baby's cord blood said yes.
It's likely President Bush will say no to Congress's latest decision on embryonic stem cells. But broad bipartisan support for a cord-blood bank shouldn't be discounted as an important advance in the debate.
A nationwide bank would be a welcome relief to new parents, who would no longer have to worry about whether to spend thousands banking their child's cord blood. (The American Academy of Pediatrics says the chances a child's own cord blood could later be used are very slim.)
And it would be a great investment in others whose lives may depend on a few ounces of cord blood, which might otherwise have been thrown away.
Laura Billings can be reached at lbillings@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5584.
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