I found this ad for an umbilical cord blood storage company in the April 2008 issue of Healthy Las Vegas.

It provides a list of all kinds of very scary-sounding diseases as reasons you should pay to store your baby’s blood cord. It’s another example of scaring parents into buying expensive products to protect their kids–and, obviously, if you won’t spend the money to store your baby’s umbilical cord blood for years, you aren’t a very good parent.

I went to the company’s website. Under the heading “You Only Get One Chance to Bank Cord Blood” it says:

Banking a baby’s cord blood could prove invaluable should you ever need it. You only have one chance to collect this vital fluid and minutes after your baby is born. This sample has the potential to not only help the baby in the future, but also to blood relatives such as parents and siblings. It offers a powerful medical resource in fighting devastating chronic and acute diseases. Think of it as an investment in your family’s future.

It costs $1,850 for the kit to collect the blood from a single birth, plus $95 a year, or $1600 for 18 years, to store it.

Just for fun I looked up the prevalence of some of the diseases listed in the ad. Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome occurs in about 1 out of every 380,000 people. For amyloidosis, it’s about 1 in 100,000. Less than 1 in 200,000 people have Wolman disease (these are all NIH estimates).

To put this in perspective, according to some calculations, a male African American child has about a 1 in 20 lifetime chance of being killed by gunfire. I don’t know what it is for white kids, but I bet that, risk-wise, you’d be better off buying your kid a bullet-proof vest than banking their cord blood.