Baby's blood could save her life

After a six- hour labour, and a lot of shouting, I was lying on the delivery bed at Queen Charlotte?s Hospital, west London, gazing happily into the eyes of my second daughter.

As Eliza gave the first of many lusty cries, the agonies of childbirth gave way to relief. But for my husband, the challenge of the delivery had only just begun.

A journalist, with experience in war zones from the Gulf to Afghanistan, as well as the domestic in-fighting of the Royal family, Richard was about to confront the true meaning of courage. With his sleeves rolled up and a determined look on his face, he carefully laid out his tools: needles, syringes and swabs, at the foot of my bed.

Instead of cuddling his newborn daughter, Richard had just a few minutes to perform the critical task of collecting a blood sample from the baby?s umbilical cord. We had decided to take the sample, which is rich in stem cells, as a biological insurance against future disease such as leukaemia and other cancers.

The lives of thousands of children worldwide have already been saved thanks to stem-cell transplants, which offer a safer alternative to bone-marrow transplants. There is no family history of such illnesses, but we wanted to be safe. The whole procedure was over in less than five minutes, yet it had taken weeks of research and hours of debate to achieve. We were not helped by the policy of Queen Charlotte?s and Chelsea Hospital, one of the capital?s leading maternity hospitals, which refused to allow its staff to use the procedure.

Stem cells help create the immune system. They are especially rich in white blood cells and provide a guaranteed match should the child ever need blood or a bone marrow transplant. Unlike bone marrow, which can be rejected by the recipient?s body, stem cells are unlikely to be rejected.

The first successful stem-cell transplant between relatives was carried out 13 years ago. They have since been used in more than 2,000 transplants to cure cancers such as leukaemia, Hodgkin?s disease and other lymphomas. Such is the rate of medical advance in this area, who knows what conditions stem cells might cure in the future? There is already a possibility that these cells might help combat Alzheimer?s, Parkinson?s and various other devastating diseases.

As ever in medical research, America is leading the way. More than 100,000 parents are storing stem cells, which keep for about 20 years, in blood banks across America. Now the procedure, which promises a mini-revolution in medical care, is coming to Britain.

I first stumbled across baby blood banks while pregnant with our first child, Isabel, who is now two. I researched on the internet, but was too distracted to enquire about having the sample taken at her birth. This time, I was determined to be more organised. Yet when I told my consultant at Queen Charlotte?s, I was told that the hospital would not allow its staff to take cord blood.

There were, apparently, two main reasons. Firstly, there was no scientific evidence, yet, that stem cells had any medical benefit. Secondly, the hospital?s medical negligence insurance might not cover staff if they failed to take a sample properly. Since the blood has to be taken from the umbilical cord in the minutes before the placenta is delivered, there is no way that the mother can go elsewhere to have a sample taken.

Queen Charlotte?s was abiding by a report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which decided last November that there was not enough scientific evidence to justify the practice.

I was dismayed by the hospital?s policy but my husband and I decided that we could never forgive ourselves if Eliza became ill in the future and we had failed to store a sample of potentially life-saving blood.

We considered the possibility of having our baby at another hospital: Queen Mary?s, in Paddington and Chelsea and Westminster in Chelsea, are just two hospitals in west London where staff are permitted to take cord blood. But I did not want to switch to a new hospital twice the distance from our home, so I searched the internet for some help. Eventually, I discovered Cryo-Care, a company based in Westminster, which offers a unique DIY blood-collection kit. Its staff were extremely helpful: they could provide the kit, complete with instructions on a CD-Rom, arrange for the blood sample to be collected from the hospital by courier, and store the samples in liquid-nitrogen refrigerators at a laboratory in Belgium for 20 years ? and all this for just under £800. The only thing they couldn?t provide was a nurse to perform the task.

I was already 36 weeks? pregnant and time was pressing, so I spent the next week trying to track down a private midwife or friendly nurse to help out. But there was one huge problem: no one could tell when Eliza was going to arrive. That meant shelling out up to £3,000 in private fees to have a nurse on standby, or hoping that a family friend with medical training would be available at a moment?s notice, potentially in the middle of the night. The only people I could rely on for certain to be at the birth were myself and my husband, so Richard was elected by default.

The procedure needed to be done immediately after the birth, so after a quick kiss for Eliza and me, as I lay exhausted with her in my arms, he laid out the kit. First he disinfected the umbilical cord with a swab, and then pricked it with a needle, and then with a syringe, to which was attached a sterile blood-collection bag. He confidently collected the 60ml of blood required and squeezed it into the bag, rather like icing a cake, before adding the anticoagulant to keep the blood in good condition. He gave the bag a shake to mix the blood with the anti-coagulant. For now the procedure was complete, and although I was focused on Eliza, I couldn?t help thinking what a marvellous job Richard had done.

I kept the precious bag by my bedside overnight before a motorcycle dispatch rider arrived the next morning on the maternity ward to take the sample to Belgium.

All in all, it had gone remarkably smoothly. But the best thing about the storage of Eliza?s cord blood sample is that, hopefully, it will never need to be used.