Cord blood stem cells can treat several diseases, including some cancers, blood disorders, and immune deficiencies. Among these are leukemia, aplastic anemia, Hodgkin’s disease, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There are many blood bank companies in the United States that exclusively store cord blood for future and emergency use.
Estimates suggests that more than one million units of cord blood are stored in family banks in the United States. And the national Be the Match Registry lists more than Twohundred and twenty five thousand donated cord blood units, with additional access to more than Seven hundred thousand cord blood units through partnerships with international registries.
Verter estimates that about five percent of parents now bank their baby’s cord blood. Ninety percent of that cord blood goes to family banks and 10 percent goes to public banks.
Some of the popular and oldest blood cord banks include Cryo-Cell, Viacord, and Cord Blood Registry. These are some of the oldest and largest private cord blood banks in the United States. They’ve been storing cord blood since the early ’90s, and they are all accredited by the AABB (the American Association of Blood Banks) Cryo-Cell located in Oldsmar, Florida; Viacord in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Cord Blood Registry in San Bruno, California.
Lifebank USA is another private bank, located in Cedar Knolls, New Jersey, that’s also accredited by the AABB. The bank lets you store umbilical cord blood and placenta blood (this is done for free). Stem cells from placenta tissue can turn into skeletal tissue types such as bone, cartilage, fat tissue, and connective tissue, whereas cells from cord blood turn into different types of blood cells. There are websites on the internet that list the number of cord blood banks. Some of the websites are parents.com, bioinformant.com, aabb.org etc. that list and compare various cord blood banks region wise.
Blood cord banks are a good option to store blood cords that are rich in stem cells as they can be useful to the person in dire times