As you may know, cord blood banking is a wonderful way that you can bank your child’s blood from the umbilical cord to allow it to provide help to your child or to another person later on in life. There are plenty of wonderful resources where you can do to learn more about this process. But, you should keep in mind that there is no 100% fool proof solution to protecting your child from possible problems today or later in life. IN any case, before you consider cord blood donating, realize the good and the bad that comes from donating to a public bank.
When you donate your baby’s cord blood publicly, you will not be able to access that blood later if your child needs it. But, it will be placed for anyone that matches your blood type and information to be used successfully. There is generally no charge for donating the blood in this manner, and there is no doubt that it will be of value to someone, probably someone that you will never know. Yet, public banking processes can be complex and often, they may not offer the benefits that we would like to think that they can offer to you.
Here are some of the problems that are associated with cord blood banking in a public banking facility.
• Although there are many tests done to insure no diseases or viruses are spread from the blood to someone that is being transplanted, there is no way to rule out any genetic conditions that may be passed from one individual to the next.
• There is no real information available to guide us to know how long cord blood can be kept safely.
• You can not find your blood if you need it later in life because of various privacy concerns.
• The cost of maintaining these public banks is quite high. Unfortunately some are not able to stay open and providing service as it can just be too costly to do so. They do not charge any storage fee to those that donate the blood.
Donating to a private cord blood bank is still a good idea. Although it may not be able to help you today, you are never going to know the benefit that it offers to those around the country that it does help. In addition, the chances that your child will actually need that blood are someplace at 1 in 2700 chances. Therefore, giving someone else the opportunity to repair their health and well being may be well worth it anyway.