Umbilical Cord Blood à la Française

We were watching the French channel TV5 last night and they had a very interesting story (in French alas, so I barely understood a few snippets here and there) about umbilical cord blood and stem cells.

In North America you can save your own baby’s umbilical cord blood and pay companies to freeze it in the unlikely event your child will benefit from the stem cells it contains in the future. This is an expensive and somewhat futile activity as the chance that your child will have a condition that would benefit from the stem cells is very low. And the cost of storing it is prohibitive, excluding all but the rich from the potential benefits.

In France they do things differently (of course!). Instead of individuals being able to save and store their baby’s umbilical cord blood and stem cells, the parents can choose to donate the cord blood to the health system. It is collected just after birth and then carefully processed to screen it for blood type and potential diseases. It then enters their public health system where it is stored and used to treat other children in need – such as children with leukemia and other diseases that the blood and stem cells can help cure.

The story followed a mother just giving birth and showed the doctor draining the blood from the cord – an taut alien-looking blue-grey twisted ropey thing. After the umbilical cord was clamped off and the baby safely in the mother’s arms he carefully inserted a thick cannula into the vein and drained the blood into a pouch. This pouch was then transported to the processing center where they showed it being filtered and tested before being labeled and stored.

The reporter then went to visit the family of a young girl who was recovering from leukemia. She had undergone the medical treatments and was now well on her way to recovery. The last step of her treatment was an infusion of cord blood and stem cells from the public blood bank which was credited with restoring her immune system to normal function.

The reporter then moved on to England where, like North America, individuals can freeze their child’s umbilical cord blood for their own use but there is no public blood bank for this. The reporter toured a cord blood freezing and storage facility and showed how the blood was cataloged then dunked into huge cylinders of liquid nitrogen where it stayed as long as the owners paid for it.

The contrast between the two systems and philosophies was stark. On one hand you have a public system where anyone’s child who needs the blood and stem cells can receive the treatment. On the other hand you have a private privilege-based system where 99.9% of the stored blood will never be used and will benefit nobody. All it is doing is taking up space and resources while making a few companies rich. And those companies do so by preying on the fears every parent has about ensuring their child has a positive future.

We’re siding with the idea of a public system. We will not be saving our baby’s umbilical cord blood for ourselves but will be investigating if there are research programs or donor programs here in Canada that we can give the blood to.

We’d much rather know our baby’s umbilical cord blood will be used for some greater good than simply to be there for our child in the unlikely event it’s needed.