1. Not very valuable. Handling and storage costs far outweigh acquisition costs.
2. Unmatched, easy; well matched, somewhat difficult.
3. Generally it depends on the specific inherited immune characteristics of mother and child, similar to these factors in kidney donation.
4. For decades, yes, for a lifetime no.
5/6 No and sort of yes.
If you are going to donate cord blood for others, as a humanitarian thing, check with your OB/GYN about whether they know who would need to be there to ship the donation.
If you are going to save it for family use, I would do so only if you are aware of a known risk requiring use of such a donation in the baby or family, such as an inherited blood disorder or similar risk factor. If there is none, the cost-effectiveness of banking with a commercial outfit is poor unless you have inexpensive access to a liquid nitrogen-level freezer for long term storage. If the family has such an inherited disorder, check with the physicians treating it for instructions.
One source I looked at was: https://parentsguidecordblood.org/en
Some highlights:
Congratulations!
If you're trying to be homo economicus and maximize your expected utility, probably it's not worth it. But if you're not, you can still do it! We did (blood and tissue).
Here is another source when looked at was: https://www.cordlifeindia.com/
If you are going to save it for family use, I would do so only if you are aware of a known risk requiring use of such a donation in the baby or family, such as an inherited blood disorder or similar risk factor. If there is none, the cost-effectiveness of cord blood banking
There is also the question of how soon to cut the cord. The reason for cutting it a bit later is that the blood from the cord still keeps flowing into the baby. Unfortunately, I completely forgot why those few extra drops are supposed to be so important, but I was told the reason years ago and it sounded just as important as the reason for storing the cord blood.
There are a lot of great points here. A couple more to consider:
With private banking, while you do pay the fees for storage, your baby's chances for a match to itself are 100%, and between 25%-75% for baby's immediate biological family ( mom, dad, sibling). And, you don't have the large fees associated with pulling out a "withdraw" as you do with public banking because you are already paying the small annual fee for storage.
People often think about the big diseases down the road, but don't forget about the more common things that can happen during the birthing process such as lack of oxygen that causes issues which are being resolved currently using baby's own stem cells.
The odds of someone needing a blood stem cell transplant of the sort that it is immediately obvious that cord blood is good for are not very high.
However, if you do you preserve stem cells and then enter them into a registry of stem cell donors, it is conceivable that you could wind up helping other people who need matched blood stem cells without the cost of extraction on an adult which is an extremely painful bone needle or a dangerous series of drugs.
My wife and I are expecting a baby this May. I only recently learned about this, but apparently there is an option to save the cord blood and tissue during the delivery. This seems potentially very useful, so I'm wondering if anyone has done research into this or has found trustworthy, informative resources on this topic.
My current understanding is that this tissue has a lot of stem cells. And the stem cells are useful for all sorts of medical procedures, and are even more likely to be used in the future. But currently we don't have an easy (or cheap?) way to get them.
Broad questions I have: