Has anyone had any experience with the various cord blood banks here in Taiwan? We didn’t save the cord blood when our first child was born, but we’re seriously considering it this time. Any info at all would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
netrealist,
This is information I got the middle of last year, from my obyn in Taipei. This is pasted from my post at parentpages.net. It may be outdated and others may have different information to input, but it’s a start for you:
[quote]I have done some asking about the donor scheme being run by HealthBanks and TziChi here, as well as the pay-yourself and keep it for your family option. The donor option sounded good to me, you can help the general public and so on… but…
First of all, the donor schemes are both private ones. If you donate your child’s cord blood stem cells and need them at a later date, you can get them for “free”… but I was warned that there will be admin fees etc for sure. What really disappointed me was this information - anyone else needing your stem cells later will have to pay a fee of between 10 and 20 thousand US dollars. That is for both schemes being run in Taiwan. (Apparently the situation is very similar in the US.) Also, currently only around 1 in 7 of donated cords can be used, the rest will be discarded.
For the personal use option, the figures I got was around 60-70000TWD for 20 years of storage, and free use for yourself and your family. 100% compatibility for the child, 1:4 for parents and siblings and 1:8 for grandparents. [/quote]
(By obyn also recommended I watch the movie “The Island” starring Ewan McGregor, and to do some research on cloning advancements in Korea. Being pregnant at the time I wasn’t really in the mood, but your question has brought it back to mind.)
Hope that helps.
Hmmm…
So basically my wife and I need to check into this a bit more. There is a LOT of info about this, but it’s all technical and takes way too much time for me to sift through.
I noticed that this was the first site to come up through Google: parentsguidecordblood.com/
Lots of info with a guarded, but positive, view on storing the blood.
So the general consensus is that it’s unnecessary and possibly a scam?
netrealist,
Sorry, I should have clarified my post a bit more. My obyn’s advice was, if we were considering storage, then he would encourage us to store core blood cells for our own private use, not donate them to the current schemes. We had wanted to offer them for public good but the payment required for those services etc didn’t sit right with me. It’s not exactly like being a blood donor where the bank is free for all.
My obyn said that research is advancing all the time and the number of illnesses the blood and stem cells can be used for is always increasing. There was some discussion about this part on parentpages.net and I remember stem cell storage being much more expensive than blood cell storage.
This is just info I got from my doctor and as we decided not to store the cells we did not do much follow-up research.
Wanfang Hospital has regular seminars on this topic that are open to the public. If either you or your wife are Chinese speakers, it might be helpful to check out one of those seminars.
All the best in your search for information.
Eh? You don’t have to pay for blood? So who pays? It doesn’t keep by itself. It must cost money to store it, etc. I can’t believe you have to pay for an aspirin but not blood.
I’m sure you can store your own blood for your own personal use, should the need arise, and I’m doubly sure they charge for storage.
Hmm, I was referring to say the Red Cross blood donor scheme where you donate your blood for use by anyone who needs it. I wasn’t aware you have to pay to use that blood if you say, have an accident? If people receiving that blood need to pay for it, I may reconsider donating next time they call me for the RH negative they sometimes need for emergencies.
With the blood cord donor scheme in Taiwan, if I donate my child’s cord for public use, and you later want to use that cord because it is compatible with say your child’s needs, you will pay around 20,000USD (they collect the fee in USD). I find this collection, especially by an organisation such as Tzi Chi, a bit out of line with my idea of a donor scheme. Also, babybanks do not tell you this part of the donor deal when they explain the service to expectant mothers. I dislike the misleading nature of it all.
(((BTW, I want to be clear, this based on info I have, if there is anything new or different, please share!)))
Maybe you don’t, then. I’d need to see an itemized surgery invoice to convince me, though! Doesn’t bother me in any case – they won’t take my blood on account of I’m a filthy foreigner.
They sometimes make special requests for mine. Does that make me a clean foreigner?
Maybe they’re cloning you! 
jdsmith,
Now, even I find the thought of two of myself quite disconcerting… could be quite helpful when both kids are crying for me though…
Anyway, I think the OP has brought up a good topic and maybe we should try to stick to it.
True, I didn’t do this the first time and I wouldn’t again if we had a second child. It sounds like a very expensive form of insurance.
Asiababy,
Thanks for trying to keep the thread on topic. I need all the info I can get on this.
I looked again at the website I posted above and I came across a quote from a cord blood bank laoban here in Taiwan. He said that the market was worth about NT$60-75 million now but expected to go up to NT$1.5 billion in three years time. I understand the profit motive very well. More power to them. But after reading that, I was left with the feeling that this is a very expensive form of insurance with very little applicability at the present time. Most people seem to be banking on “it will be very useful in the future” -type information, which bascially comes across to me as marketing.
Do you know of anyone that has actually done this?
When I looked into it it seemed that most of the advice was that it was not worth it. Chances of the kids every needing was very slim and if they did need it chances were they couldn’t use their own cord blood. Best case scenario is to start a public bank like asiababy mentioned so whoever needed it could find a proper match. Then just yesterday I saw this on Yahoo
A three-year-old leukemia victim was given a life-saving infusion of her own cord blood, marking the first time a child with this disease served as their own blood donor, American doctors said.
I think it’s a bit of a con preying on the fears of parents. It’s really big business here with ads on the television and all. No ads in Australia about it but then again even drug company ads for various medication is banned. You should see the drug company ads in the united united states. crazy!
Well anyway i found the wikipedia article on Cord Blood Banks was a useful starting place.
I also found this article was helpful to me:
IS IT WORTH BANKING YOUR BABY’S CORD BLOOD?
Doctors say hard sell of hope is deceptive
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/20/MNG9GDBBLS1.DTL
I find it amusing that the spend x amount of dollars (Roughly $2000 US) to keep and store their babies cord blood and then they drive their newborn baby home in a car with no car seat for a baby. Just the newborn sitting on mum’s lap.
Also taking cord blood may actual harm the new born by clamping the cord to early. From Wiki:
[quote]Concerns have been raised that the current interest in cord blood could cause a perception that cord blood is ‘unused’ by the birth process, thus decreasing the amount of blood which is infused into the child as part of the birth process. The pulsation of the cord pushes blood into the child, and it has been recommended that the cord cease pulsation prior to clamping. With the demand for cord blood increasing, there is a possibility that the cord could be clamped prematurely to preserve even more ‘extra’ cord blood. This action could have detrimental effects on the child’s future development.
The American Academy of Pediatricians notes: “if cord clamping is done too soon after birth, the infant may be deprived of a placental blood transfusion, resulting in lower blood volume and increased risk for anemia.”[/quote]
I would not recommend this UNLESS you have plenty of extra cash or your children have a higher risk of some type of leukemia for whatever reason.
I would recommend this if you didn’t have to pay anything of course as it is a great idea to create the valuable donation bank, mostly for us by OTHER people.
These stem cells have only been used to help rare forms of leukemia so far, no other application has come out of it really. The fact is science is advancing very quickly, adult stem cells will soon be able to be used for treatments, the storage of these UCB cells doensn’t make much sense to me from an ‘insurance’ point of view, the chance of using these cells is EXTREMELY small and gets smaller the longer they are kept and as your children grow up and technological advances move on.
Many of these cord blood banks are unethical. They do not give full disclosure of what they are doing with the cells. I know for a fact they sell them overseas and also use them for research while still charging customers storage fees (the huge banks provide a very valuable range of genetic typed material for drug trials, this is a little known secret of this industry and I have worked in a related industry and know some of these companies). Ci Ji buddhist charity is probably the best as they have a more open access policy to their blood bank.
You cannot trust the doctors/nurses as they simply don’t have a clue in the main and some may get kickbacks.
[quote=“headhonchoII”]I would not recommend this UNLESS you have plenty of extra cash or your children have a higher risk of some type of leukemia for whatever reason.
I would recommend this if you didn’t have to pay anything of course as it is a great idea to create the valuable donation bank, mostly for us by OTHER people.
These stem cells have only been used to help rare forms of leukemia so far, no other application has come out of it really. The fact is science is advancing very quickly, adult stem cells will soon be able to be used for treatments, the storage of these UCB cells doensn’t make much sense to me from an ‘insurance’ point of view, the chance of using these cells is EXTREMELY small and gets smaller the longer they are kept and as your children grow up and technological advances move on.
Many of these cord blood banks are unethical. They do not give full disclosure of what they are doing with the cells. I know for a fact they sell them overseas and also use them for research while still charging customers storage fees (the huge banks provide a very valuable range of genetic typed material for drug trials, this is a little known secret of this industry and I have worked in a related industry and know some of these companies). Ci Ji buddhist charity is probably the best as they have a more open access policy to their blood bank.
You cannot trust the doctors/nurses as they simply don’t have a clue in the main and some may get kickbacks.[/quote]
Totally agree man. I had to do some research to set my girlfriends mind at ease. She sees the ads on TV with famous dude saying it could help the whole family and so forth. Her sisters have a bit more money and have paid $2000 US to have it done.
Feel sorry for these taiwanese people sometimes. Cord Blood Banking is BIG BUSINESS in Taiwan:
Cord blood banking gaining popularity
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2008/01/09/2003396398
RISING TREND Taiwan has one of the highest market penetration rates for cord blood saving, which could nearly double in two years to 15 percent, a domestic firm projected
I totally thought kickbacks and unethical when i read about it. You should see how drug companies schmooze Doctors with free holidays and incentives to prescribe their name brand over a generic stuff. Creeps.
We know a blood specialist doctor at a large public hospital here, and he didn’t keep the cord blood for his child when his wife gave birth!