Bone marrow transplants are procedures that involve transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells. It is mainly done on people with bone marrow or blood cancer and even some diseases. Bone marrow transplants are very dangerous and have many complications; it is mainly for patients with life threatening diseases. The reason why this is very dangerous is because you really don’t have an immune system because of all the chemotherapy and radiation you have to go through. When you kill the immune system you are more vulnerable to viruses, but it also gives the new bone marrow a better chance to work. It is like that saying, a clean slate. If you try to do a transplant with cancer cells the transplant has a less chance of taking because it does not have any good cells to work with and the immune system would see the good marrow as bad marrow and attack it. Now I am going to tell you why fetal bone marrow is the best source of stem cells for transplantation.
A study done by Maria Michejda, a Ph.D at Georgetown, found out that fetal bone marrow, from spontaneous abortions, is eight times more effective than umbilical cord blood, and twenty-three more times effective than adult bone marrow, for bone marrow transplantation. The reason for this is because fetal bone marrow contains the highest concentration of CD34+ cells, which is just the cells that are responsible for creating new blood cells, and it also contains the lowest concentration of CD-3. CD-3 cells are the cells that identify and reject foreign tissue. CD-3 cells are the main reasons transplants do not work.
Fetal bone marrow transplants will begin to change the way people do things. Before you start to think that fetal bone marrow comes from living babies think again. Fetal bone marrow does not put babies in pain or anything because it is not taken from them; it is taken from spontaneous abortions. Now when women have miscarriages they can take the bone marrow and save it for people that needs transplants. This will benefit the world in the long run because most bone marrow will accept FMB, instead of treating it like a foreign object. So this will cause more people to recover from bone marrow transplants instead of reject it and die
Bibliography
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Bone Marrow Transplant.” ScienceDaily, 6 Jun. 1997. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_marrow_transplant
Bone Marrow Transplant.”Wikipedia, 6 Jun. 1997. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/06/970606123807.htm
Transplantation.” ScienceDaily, 6 Jun. 1997. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.