Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 6 Hansard (18 June) . . Page.. 2087 ..

MR SMYTH

One of the stories tells of how cord blood from one brother saved the other. Joseph Davis Jr had sickle-cell anaemia. His parents, Joseph Sr and Darlene, had been searching for a matching blood donor for more than a year. Five months into her second pregnancy with another son, to be called Isaac, Darlene discovered that her unborn child was a match.

During his battle with sickle-cell anaemia, Joseph Jr had so much swelling of the feet and hands that he could not wiggle his fingers and his toes or crawl. He would wake up in the middle of the night crying in pain. There was nothing his parents could do but treat the symptoms. Joseph Jr had been hospitalised for problems with his bones and his spleen. His abnormally rigid red blood cells entered blood vessels and clogged pathways, causing swelling and pain. He had had around 15 hospital visits in the space of a year.

After a long search for a stem cell match, doctors tested Darlene's unborn baby to see if there was a match-there is a one in four chance that a sibling will be a stem cell match. Unborn Isaac was indeed a match and, when he was born, the umbilical cord blood was saved and used to treat Joseph Jr.

Cord blood is the blood remaining in the umbilical cord and the placenta after the birth of a baby. During pregnancy, oxygen and essential nutrients pass from the mother's blood into the blood of the baby. The blood found in the umbilical cord and the placenta after birth is unique because it carries a large number of blood stem cells-blood cells, which create the red cells that carry oxygen; white cells, which fight disease; and platelets, which help the blood to clot.

When patients are treated for leukaemia and certain other diseases, their stem cells are often wiped out. Research to date indicates that cord blood replenishes these vital stem cells, making recovery possible. In the late 1980s, cord blood was identified as a rich source of haematopoietic stem cells with the potential to supplement bone marrow as the normal source of stem cells for treating people with leukaemia. Stem cells from cord blood are used to treat a variety of cancers and blood diseases: leukaemia, metabolic disorders, bone marrow failure/blood disorders, genetic disorders, such as sickle-cell anaemia, and immunodeficiencies.

Around 30 per cent of patients with leukaemia who need a stem cell transplant can find a matching bone marrow donor among their relatives. The remaining 70 per cent have to find an unrelated donor. There can be problems matching donors to recipients. Every cell in the body has a set of unique identifying markers, called HLA tissue types. The chance of finding someone with those same markers is about 25 per cent in the immediate family, but it is 0.1 per cent among the general public.

A bone marrow transplant donor must have exactly the same six-tissue types. It is an enormous task for medical experts to line up the six different tissue types and test them as part of the process. The danger is that a mismatch can cause problems, the most concerning of which is when the new bone marrow turns on the person into whom it has been injected. The medical term for that is "graft versus host disease"or, commonly, GVHD.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .