My career as an international blood smuggler
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It wasn't just an American company, there were actually two companies, Bayer (German) and Baxter (American). Baxter have a history of very shady things, I'm surprised they're around. I wish the author cite the quote or more clear on that part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_International#1996_Japa...
> In 1895, the German drug company Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as an over-the-counter drug under the trademark name Heroin.[69] It was developed chiefly as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants that did not have morphine's addictive side-effects. Morphine at the time was a popular recreational drug, and Bayer wished to find a similar but non-addictive substitute to market. However, contrary to Bayer's advertising as a "non-addictive morphine substitute," heroin would soon have one of the highest rates of addiction among its users.[70]
https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/arkansas-bloodsucker...
"Cryosan had a shady reputation in the medical industry. It had been nabbed importing blood taken from Russian cadavers and relabeling it as though it was from Swedish volunteers."
and Arkansas way of screening for HIV:
"Pine Bluffs president Jimmy Lord dismissed such concerns and suggested that AIDs was not a problem in Arkansas. “If anyone got caught in a homosexual act,” Lords said, “we took them off the roster.”"
I was well aware of the exploitation of paid US blood donors (for those who have not taken the time to read the article, or are familiar with the history, paid donation comes about with an enormous decrease in voluntary donation, ie. ‘the death of civic duty’. Aus which is a net plasma exporter and which is a volunteer only country has a strange situation where the Red Cross accepts voluntary donations but then gives (?sells - it was nice and simple when the C in CSL stood for commonwealth) it to other companies which refine it, is predicted to be unable to meet its needs should it introduce paid donations) and i’m not overly surprised to hear of exploitation of Chinese donors.
So nothing so new here.
I will say however that the authour throwing ‘we don’t know what will happen to plasma donors’: >Apart from economic exploitation, the risk to long-term donors is unknown. The product insert that comes with my Baxter-branded Gammagard immunoglobin stretches several feet long and lists everything from blood clots to fever and chills as possible side-effects. For me, an infusion means feeling, at best, like I have the flu for a few days every six weeks. I don’t know what happens to people who give raw materials, so I watch my infusion nurse – the donor – as much as she watches me.
So the authour has an autoimmune condition that requires the infusion of IVIG every 4-6 weeks or so. Awful condition, great and successful treatment.
I still can’t get behind an elaborate statement designed to cast doubt on the safety of (appropriately scheduled) donation, and actually it is so far from a plausible scientific mechanism of causing harm that I have to call it out. Back in Med school we used to joke about blood/plasma donation as a form of weight loss (‘I just gave away 250g of cells!) - the body then has to spend about x2 that in raw energy in the anabolic process of recreating those cells. The rates of donation that are talked about though, of 2 times a week, are so far above what is allowed in a rational donor program (Red Cross Australia only allows a plasma donation once a month). Still, in a healthy person, that would not be an overt drain on the body’s Capacity to recover.
Really interesting article though and I hope everyone learned something!
The US does not permit paid blood donation, and this article is not about paid blood donation. It's about paid PLASMA donation. Plasma is 1 of 3 components of blood. Blood donations in the US are unpaid (as long as you don't count that free t-shirt or free movie ticket as compensation).
*In High School I ran my schools 3 annual blood drives and completed all the associated training to do the drives. During the 2 years (and 6 drives) I ran the program, we broke the state record for High School donations 3 times. I personally was a whole blood gallon donor before graduating High School. I've also done plasma donations, concentrated red cell donations, and platelet donations; so I've donated the whole spectrum :)
0: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/study-shows-ir...
1: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170921095515.h...
It's not purely a for-profit problem, though; the UK had its own disaster which is still inadequately addressed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45654783
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infected_blood_scandal_(France...
Even if it was in the public health system, there's still money to be made around such products.
Plasma is an industry there.
Meanwhile, in Canada, we’re steadfast against paid donations. But the volunteer model doesn’t generate enough blood products, so we have to import from the US too.
Edit: I had said 3%, but it’s 1.3%. Still a lot in the grand scheme of things.
Steadfast against paid donations, but yet willing to import paid-donation blood? Wouldn't it be better to regulate your own for-profit blood donation system than it is to trust that the US (or any other country) is doing things the way you want?
I suppose the idea is that discouraging it domestically will eventually catch up to the demand. But if you allow prostituting of blood domestically you'll never get there?
The countries that do paid plasma donations end up supplying (and profiting from) countries with only volunteer plasma donor systems.
> Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters (an initialism): BBC, CEO, US, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, Unicef, unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card. Note that pdf and plc are lowercase.