Blood

There are lots of things you learn about while pregnant, several are not appropriate for our blog. But one of them I want to pass along is about cord blood. Cord blood is blood collected from the umbilical cord and placenta after the baby is born. Normally, it is just discarded as waste with other birth leftovers. But, it contains stem cells that can be used to treat some cancers (leukemia) and hereditary disorders. And it is being used in research for use on many other diseases. There are a couple options for collecting and storing the cord blood for use: public and private. Private cord blood banks charge you a fee to store your child's blood in case that child or a family member needs it in the future. It costs several thousand dollars for the initial fees and a few hundred a year to store it. There are tons of private banks that try to get people to store their cord blood. A lot of medical organizations don't recommend doing it this way because the likelihood of a child needing their own cord blood is very low. This brings us to the other option...donating to a public bank. Donating to a public bank enables the blood to be used by anyone it is a match with for use in treating disease. It could go to another kid who needs it to be treated for leukemia. Or it can be used for research to find ways to use stem cells to treat other diseases. The best thing is that it is free to donate to a public bank. And unlike a private bank (where it most likely will never be used), the majority of blood in a public bank are used to help people.

Something else we recently discovered was that Arkansas now has it's first public cord blood bank at UAMS. You can find more info here.....http://www.cordbloodbankarkansas.org/

I realize it may be a hard decision for people to decide whether or not to donate their child's cord blood after birth but I wanted to put this info out there for people to at least know this option is available.