Toronto Health

When it comes to preserving valuable bodily fluids for the sake of medicine, cord blood is one of the most valuable types of blood. For those that aren’t aware what cord blood is blood that comes from the umbilical cord when a women is pregnant with a child. The cord blood remains in the placenta in the attached umbilical cord once the child is delivered. Once the baby has left the uterus, the cord blood is obtained from the umbilical cord once the cord is severed from the newborn child.

The main reason that cord blood is so precious, and hence collected and preserved, is that is contains stem cells, including certain types like hematopoietic cells, which are important because they can be used to help treat genetic disorders in human beings.

Once the cord blood is collected, it is then cyropreserved and then its off to be stored in a cord blood bank. These cells then can be used to benefit the person who they were taken from in case of any genetic disorders. Most cord blood banks are either public or private, with public ones serving the public citizens and private ones charging a fee for parents to ensure the cord blood in case of future use for their child. The fee usually ranges around a couple thousand dollars to process and store the cord blood at one of these private cord blood storage banks.

As a newborn parent, cord blood banking is a way of insuring your child’s safety in case of genetic disorders and other potential health complications. Although nothing is guaranteed, storing the cord blood is another measure to increase your chances of staying healthy, especially for newborn and young children.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.