Huang Xingxia, a 28-year-old woman from Anhui Province, delivered her second son in a local hospital over the weekend. Now she is waiting to see if the umbilical cord blood from the delivery can be used to help her first son, who suffers from leukemia.
Doctors at Shanghai No. 1 People's Hospital collected the umbilical cord blood, so the stem cells can be used to perform a bone marrow transplant.
A sample of the blood is being tested at the Shanghai Umbilical Cord Blood Bank, and Huang will know if it can help her first son within a month.
If the blood is a match, doctors at Shanghai No. 1 hospital will perform the transplant. If it doesn't match, Huang said she will donate the blood to the Umbilical Cord Blood Bank.
"Since the disease is so terrible, it would be meaningful if we could help others," she said.
Huang and her son Shu Haowen arrived in the city five years ago to stay with her husband who works as a construction worker here. Shu is now six years old.
He was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of three, and has recently slipped into remission.
After the family heard that umbilical cord blood was the best chance for finding a matching sample for a transplant, Huang and her husband applied to authorities in their hometown to have a second child. They were quickly granted permission.
The chance of umbilical cord blood from the birth of a sibling being a good match for a transplant is 25 percent.
"We are calling on more people to join the stem cell bank and donate their stem cells or children's umbilical cord blood for leukemia patients," said Dr Chen Jing from Shanghai Children's Medical Center.
(Shanghai Daily November 7, 2005)
