New lives at Fort Bragg may be helping to save lives. As of this month, Womack Army Medical Center is the first military base in the country to offer cord blood donation services to all mothers who deliver their babies there.

Ft. Bragg is the largest army installation in the world. Womack delivers approximately 270 babies each month, or just over 3,000 births per year.

The cord blood that nourishes babies in the womb is rich in blood-forming cells that can benefit children and adults with a variety of life-threatening diseases and conditions. It is harvested from the umbilical cord and placenta immediately after the baby is born.

"Cord blood treats patients with leukemia, with bone marrow failure, with sickle cell anemia and thalassemia, with immune deficiencies like the bubble boy syndrome, and children with metabolic diseases," said Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg, chief of the Division of Pediatric Blood and Bone Marrow Transplantation at Duke University Medical Center.

Moms may volunteer to donate their babies' cord blood to the Carolinas Cord Blood Bank, a public cord blood bank based at Duke University Medical Center. In just the first month, Womack has collected 35 units.

"Cord blood harvesting is not controversial as embryonic stem cell can be in that we only use products of afterbirth," said Dr. Sammy Choi of Womack Army Medical Center. "These products of afterbirth previously were considered medical waste."

The valuable stem cells provided by cord blood benefit children and adults who can't find fully matched adult blood or bone marrow donors. Today, there are about 100,000 units in public cord blood banks in the United States.

According to Dr. Kurtzberg, there are four times that number in private banks, saved by parents as insurance for their children against future illness.

"Only about 30 of those have been used, and those have mostly been used for a sibling," she said. "Whereas there are about 100,000 in public banks, and of those, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 have been used, so the usage is proportionately much higher."

For new mom Tabitha Taylor, the decision to donate her son's cord blood was an easy one.

"I have family members that have been affected by cancer, so anything I hear about possible treatments and cures, I'm curious about," she said. "I decided it was something I was interested in doing to help somebody else's child."

The Carolinas Cord Blood Bank works with six other hospitals across the state in coordinating cord blood donation, inlcuding Duke Hospital, Durham Regional Hospital, UNC Hospital, Rex Hospital, Western Wake Hospital and the Women's Hospital of Greensboro.

Dr. Kurtzberg said the average hospital's donation rate is about 10 percent of births, but she is hopeful that Womack will have as much as 60 percent of its deliveries result in donation.

The inauguration of the new program is yet another major step toward expanding cord blood services in North Carolina. Under new legislation sponsored by State Rep. Margaret Dickson of Fayetteville and approved by Gov. Beverly Perdue, women will soon be able to find cord blood donation information on a website hosted by the state Department of Health and Human Services. The website is expected to be available Jan. 1, 2010.

Additional information about cord blood donation and transplantation is available from the Carolinas Cord Blood Bank at http://www.cancer.duke.edu/ccbb and from the National Marrow Donor Program at www.BeTheMatch.org/cord.