Blood donation is a selfless act that saves lives and evokes thoughts of Red Cross blood drives and good Samaritans doing their part. Selling plasma, the fluid, yellowish protein fraction of blood, is a whole different matter.
As an indication of how desperate some members of America’s working poor are for cash, they sell their plasma, despite the fact that it is not a viable endeavor. Donors are compensated approximately $25 for their first visit, potentially $5 more for subsequent trips, and up to $100 for their tenth donation. It is a job that, at most, may pay for a tank of petrol or some groceries.
One regular donor family in Idaho planned their daughter’s 18th birthday at a local plasma center. They desired that she begin selling plasma on the very first day she was legally permitted to do so.
Similar to blood donation, plasma extraction involves the donor sitting in a chair for around an hour while their vital fluids are extracted using a needle inserted into a vein. The majority of people are eligible, if they are not too old or overweight. Ineligible individuals can include those with high blood pressure, the flu, or communicable disorders such as hepatitis or HIV. There are no documented adverse health effects associated with the procedure, although at least one donor has reported experiencing extreme weariness on the days his plasma is collected. The guy disclosed to author Kathleen McLaughlin in “Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry” that losing plasma drained his body almost to the bone (Atria). “This is a distinct type of fatigue.”
McLaughlin writes, “Paid plasma extraction is nothing but a low-paying, exploitative job.”
Still, the individuals who stand in line at plasma centers frequently rely on the money.
In Florida in 2014, after a lady was told she could not donate owing to obvious illness, she threatened she would “kill them all” before driving her Honda Accord into the facility’s front windows.
According to McLaughlin, plasma has been used to manufacture effective treatments.
In the 1950s and 1960s, physicians began treating immunocompromised patients with plasma-derived immune cell injections. Today, these drugs aid in cardiac surgeries, burn treatments, and the care of children with blood problems; but, from the outset, the pharmaceutical business has extracted plasma primarily from individuals with no other option. In the 1960s, Arkansas compelled inmates in state jails to donate blood, paying them a pitiful pittance before reselling it to a biomedical company in Little Rock for $50 each. In the 1990s, the province of Henan in China had a “bizarre plasma economy” in which entire villages donated plasma for easy cash. As a result of the Chinese government’s omission of warnings about the risks of organ donation, as many as one million citizens contracted HIV.
Today, just five nations, including Austria, Germany, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, permit plasma-for-cash sales, but the United States is the largest producer. The United States, dubbed the “OPEC of plasma,” produced blood products valued over $24 billion in 2021. That is 2.69 percent of the nation’s overall exports.
McLaughlin believes Americans donate so much not because of altruism, but because the United States has greater economic inequality than other nations. Over the course of two years, she interviewed more than one hundred plasma donors, the majority of them admitted doing so for “extra income.”
This is likely why McLaughlin discovered the majority of plasma centers in economically distressed places, such as Flint, Michigan, where the demise of the automobile industry has led to significant unemployment, and El Paso, Texas. Prior to the implementation of Covid, as many as 10,000 Mexicans regularly crossed the border to sell blood components for profit before returning to their homes in Juarez.
“In the same way that pawn shops were once a sign of a struggling community, the vampire-like presence of the plasma industry can now reveal much about a city or town,” argues McLaughlin. This seems to be a tendency throughout the Rust Belt, the South, and the Southwest around the Mexico border.
The author, who suffers from an immunological disease, is kept alive by intravenous human immunoglobulin (IVIG), the most widely produced substance derived from plasma.
But her personal tale is also instructive in that the plasma she sold for $25 is converted into a drug that costs $10,000 for a six-month supply (this amount is, fortunately, covered by her insurance.) When the author told a Flint plasma donor about the price disparity, he could only laugh.
Why have we chosen that the blood of America’s working poor will feed a vast, profit-driven worldwide industry? McLaughlin asks. One donor from Idaho brushed aside the question, stating, “People will do anything for money.”
McLaughlin discovered plasma centers primarily in impoverished cities.
Emily, a plasma seller in Texas, concurred, underlining who is largely exploited to increase the global riches of multinational corporations.
“I’m thankful and grateful it’s a possibility,” she says, revealing that her repeated traffic offenses led to costly legal issues she could not afford. “There is sometimes nothing else we can do. If I could, I would sell my kidney in order to pay for my probation.”
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