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  • Essay / Stem cells, umbilical cord blood banks and...

    Nowadays, there are many alternatives or any other methods to improve healthcare, especially in the world of transplantation. There are few choices available to people today like embryonic stem cells, bone marrow stem cells, peripheral blood cells and the newest one is umbilical cord blood. Umbilical cord blood (UCB) defined by Chima and Mamdoo (2011, p. 79) as blood collected from the cut umbilical cord attached to the placenta of a newborn after childbirth. It has been stated (Chima and Mamdoo 2011, p. 79) that the marrow derived from the allantois has a rich source of multipotent stem cells, including CD34+, CD38- and hematopoietic progenitor cells. This shows that cord blood may have more potential than bone marrow cells in patients with hematological or non-hematological problems. The first successful umbilical cord transplant took place in 1989 in a child with Fanconi anemia and since then the growth or demand for cord blood has increased. As we can see, this has contributed to one of the main reasons for the need to donate umbilical cord blood, store it, process it, freeze it and release it to the patient. Thus, the establishment of cord blood banking (CBB) increased due to demand (Ballen 2010, p. 8). As Ballen (2005, p. 3786) mentions, the first establishment of a cord blood bank took place in the early 1990s in New York, Milan and Düsseldorf. Cord blood storage could last approximately 15 years (Fadel 2006, p. 1). The fact is that there are many ethical and legal questions raised by this CBB that require clarification and justification, such as informed consent, property and ownership rights, cord blood collection, and public versus public CBB. to the private CBB. As mentioned earlier, there are issues with informed consent, but what is informed consent really and what are the considerations for this cord blood bank. First, what is meant by informed consent is permission given by someone in one name to another. According to Petrini (2010, p. 140), Beauchamp and Childress discovered certain types of process elements leading to informed consent. The first concerns the threshold elements (preconditions) that must be understood and decided. Second, the information element, which means clarifying things or clarifying the information given, the correct recommendation of the plan and understanding the previous elements..