Mr GRIFFIN(1.19 p.m.) —I would like to start by congratulating the member for Stirling (Mr Eoin Cameron) for bringing this motion before the House. I will admit ignorance of the detail of this issue until I saw the motion on the Notice Paper . But, in the brief time that I have had to do a little research on the issue, I have found it a fascinating subject and something that, as the father of three children, I admit I have been somewhat remiss about myself: I recall that I cut the umbilical cord of my last child—if only I had realised what I was wasting in the process.

The motion is timely—it is something that this parliament should debate—and it raises some important issues. We can all agree on one thing: the question of an umbilical cord blood bank is an issue of national importance and international significance. It ought to be progressed as effectively as it can be, although noting the issues that the member for Stirling mentioned around the question of feasibility and location, et cetera.

I will kick-off with a couple of paragraphs from a number of articles on this issue. One is in LAB News of September 1995 and encapsulates some of the background to this subject:

First it was bottles and cans, then paper, now it seems blood could be the next resource to find a place as a recycled product.

Not your regular adult variety with its reactive properties, antibodies to past infections and possibly viruses, but the unsullied blood produced by a foetus in the womb and normally lost following birth when the placenta is discarded.

Up to 250 mL of this valuable resource is contained within the placenta and umbilical cord after the baby is delivered. So called "cord blood" is rich in bone marrow stem cells, the precursors of various types of blood cells, and is ideal as a way to treat disorders in children such as leukaemia, thalassaemia, aplastic anaemia and a myriad of genetic diseases.

Cord blood is also less reactive than the bone marrow used at present in the treatment of these conditions. Donor marrow contains lymphocytes that often look upon the patient's own blood and tissue as foreign. These donated cells attack this alien matter causing the severe and often fatal reaction graft-versus-host disease.

The new Australian Cord Blood Bank at the Prince of Wales Children's Hospital in Sydney is the first organisation in this country to exploit the benign nature of cord blood in the management of critically ill children.

The Bank, officially opened on June 19, will collect about 3000 donations over the next three years. This blood will be made available to physicians and scientists throughout the country and overseas for further research into the benefits of cord blood transplantation.

Many children with conditions affecting the bone marrow die for the lack of a substitute for bone marrow transplantation. This is where cord blood can have greatest impact. "In Australia, 40 to 50 children each year are likely to benefit from cord blood transplants," said paediatric oncologist Professor Marcus Vowels, co-director of the fledgling bank. "As many as 25 of these will be patients with leukaemia who don't have suitable donors."

The non-invasive nature and safety of cord blood donations should encourage mothers to agree to the blood being collected. They will be given all relevant information about cord blood and its uses and be asked to sign a consent form. In cases where mothers wish to take the placenta home with the child for cultural reasons, it may be possible to extract the cord blood and then return the placenta to meet the mother's cultural needs.

Although cord blood is less reactive than bone marrow and does not need to be perfectly matched to the recipient, donations from all cultural groups will be necessary to provide a comprehensive bank with blood types suitable for all children with bone marrow disorders. Professor Vowels said that it is very likely in the future that all mothers would be prepared to donate cord blood. This is a resource with a tremendous potential for children with diseases affecting the bone marrow, so we should make the most of it.

The first cord blood transplant was performed in 1988 in Paris, France. The patient was a five-year old boy with Fanconi anaemia who is alive and disease free today. Since then, cord blood transplants have been successfully performed on patients with acute lymphocytic leukaemia, acute myelocytic leukaemia, nueroblastoma, juvenile chronic myelogenous leukaemia and a range of other diseases that I am afraid I am incapable of pronouncing.

Although early cord blood transplants involved only sibling donors and recipients, 90 transplants were performed between August 1993 and November 1995 using cord blood from an unrelated donor. In most cases, the cord blood donors and transplant recipients were not HLA matched—that is, proteins on the surface of white blood cells, HLA antigens, that play an important role in transplantation were not identical. Despite the mismatch, the transplants have been successful. Some of that information is from BMT Newsletter.

To put this in the context of the personal I would like to quote from an article in the Australian regarding the launch of the Cord Blood Bank. It states:

In an auspicious start to her life, six-day-old Claudia Granneman has paved the way for a revolutionary technique in treating leukaemia and congenital diseases in children.

Claudia and her mother, Ms Anne Mortimer, are the first donors to Australia's first bank collecting blood from the umbilical cord, which was opened in Sydney yesterday.

The Australian Cord Blood Bank—the first outside the United States—will collect the placentas from the more than 258,000 births every year Australia in the ultimate form of recycling.

. . . . . . . . .

Professor Vowels performed the first transplant in Australia of related cord blood on a boy, now aged eight, in October 1991 who was born with a genetic immune deficiency which usually kills children in the first 10 years of life.

"His brother died at six years from the disease . . . but he's alive, well and cured," Professor Vowels said.

"We have a rich resource that is currently being discarded."

Professor Vowels said the blood could benefit 100-150 Australians each year unable to find donors of bone marrow on the international registry.

In addition, of the 180 children in Australia and New Zealand diagnosed every year with leukaemia, about 30 children were left with no option after not responding to drug therapy and unable to receive a bone marrow transplant.

I have quoted extensively because this issue is quite technical in nature and does require the wording of others on some occasions to actually encapsulate the information in the time that I have. But certainly what we do have here is a tremendous opportunity and something that should be supported by both sides of the chamber.

I also congratulate the Minister for Health and Family Services (Dr Wooldridge) for the government's initiative of some $200,000 last year to help kick off the funding required. My understanding is that something like $500,000 is required to get this bank up and running. I am unaware of the detail in terms of where fundraising is at at this stage, but I certainly hope it is an initiative that all Australians get behind. There is nothing like the death of a child and the possibility of saving that child from death as an initiative that we see as positive for our future. As I understand it, the proposed cost of this in the Australian context will be negligible. This contrasts with the cost, prior to the setting up of the bank, of something in the region of $28,000 per person to arrange for the importation of the necessary material from the United States.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the advantages of this particular type of transplant is that at the moment with bone marrow the circumstances are—and I am no technical expert, but I will ramble on a bit—that there are something like six components of bone marrow which are required for a match. For bone marrow to be transplanted a six-six match is required in terms of the bone marrow compo nents. The situation with cord blood is that, because it is newer and has not developed all the various biases and viruses that our bodies develop over time and we develop over time, it has a certain naivety which makes it of much greater significance. On that basis, there have been successful matches with cord blood where only three in six of the components have been required.

This therefore means that somewhere in the region of maybe only 100 cord blood samples should be required to get a match for any one individual. That is great news for people with children who are suffering from this type of disease. It gives them a real chance at life. The other thing I was interested to find out is that the stem cells, even though they are injected into a vein, which is the normal process, head straight for the bone marrow. So they are quite clever in that respect; they know where they live.

The situation the last I had heard was that there had been three cord blood transplants in Sydney—two within families and one unrelated—and they had all been successful. The condition has a capacity to be expanded in terms of a range of different types of gene therapy. This means we are really seeing the commencement of a form of medical revolution which can relate to seriously improving the chances for our children to live longer lives. I congratulate all those involved with the motion. I think it sets out a process for the future in terms of proceeding with this and I commend it to the House. (Time expired)