Private cord blood banking

Private banking as 'insurance'
The opportunity to use cord blood for a treatment such as the one Dallas Hextell underwent is the kind of "biological insurance" that proponents of private cord-blood banking often tout.

But a 2007 policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics discouraged private cord-blood banking, except for families in which there is a sibling with a medical condition that could potentially benefit from cord-blood transplantation.

Dr. Mitchell Cairo, professor of pediatrics, medicine and pathology at Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of New York-Presbyterian, Columbia University and a co-author of the AAP statement, says that despite the apparent early successes in the Duke cerebral palsy clinical trial, "we haven't reached the point such that we recommend [private] cord-blood banking. The greatest need is for public banking for those diseases we know can be cured with cord blood."

The probability of using privately banked cord blood to treat a child or a family member is very low -- about 1 in 2,700 individuals, according to a recent committee opinion issued by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. And the expense, which is not covered by insurance, is considerable.

For example, the Cord Blood Registry, one of the largest private cord blood banks in the world, charges an initial fee of $2,150 and an annual storage fee of $125. It says it has stored the cord blood of more than 200,000 children since its inception in 1992. Since then, only 67 of its clients have withdrawn the cord blood for medical use (either for the child who donated the cord blood or a relative).

Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, director of the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Program at Duke University Medical Center, agrees that it would be premature to recommend private cord-blood banking based on the early results from her research. Should cord blood be proven an effective treatment for cerebral palsy, Kurtzberg would like to see a system that would allow parents to donate their child's cord blood to a public bank, with the guarantee that the blood would be on reserve for their exclusive use for one year, because cerebral palsy is often not diagnosed until well after birth.

After a year, the cord blood would become part of the public bank and could be used by others in need.

Source - Los Angeles Times

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