California's birth certificate fees will rise by $2 to $16 to help finance a pioneering effort to get families to collect and bank newsborns' umbilical cord blood.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation late Tuesday that was authored by Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge. Assembly Bill 52 is designed to enable more parents to volunteer -- at no cost -- to donate cord blood that can help cure cancers and other diseases if it matches a patient.
"I am ecstatic that Governor Schwarzenegger signed this bill," said Portantino. "It will save lives and put California at the forefront of public umbilical cord blood collection for the entire nation."
A chief aim of the boosting collection in California, he said, is to increase the diversity in blood banks of cord blood from ethnic minorities and mixed-race people.
The Legislature approved a cord blood collection program in 2007 but it was not funded. This law, which received overwhelming bipartisan support, moves control of the program from the state Department of Public Health to the University of California, which has experience in stem cell research from umbilical cord blood.
Such blood can be used, if a donation matches a patient, to treat diseases such as leukemia and sickle cell anemia. Cord blood stem cells are 100 times easier to match than bone marrow and are increasingly in use in medical treatment.
Only a fraction of parents currently save cord blood, often for their own possible family use, when a baby is born. The cost of collection is about $2,000 and banking it can cost more than $100 a year.
Right now, a Caucasian patient in need of a transplant of this blood has a 60 percent chance of finding a match. African Americans and Asians have a 30 percent and Latinos a 40 percent chance.
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