Plasma, a $24 billion dollar industry, is more valuable than oil itself. From extracting a yellow liquid from the blood, the benefits are tremendous. It helps patients recover from undergoing chemotherapy and burn victims, but also generates high profits from pharmaceutical companies for creating expensive medications that help improve and save thousands of lives.
In most countries, blood donation for compensation is banned, but not in the United States. In America, plasma donors are paid to give their plasma, causing them to provide more then 70% of the world’s plasma.
Companies call this a donation but donations are supposed to be free. These private plasma companies are exploiting people with their economic conditions, indirectly forcing them to lie about their health to get the handful of cash to pay the rest of their rent, or grab another batch of drugs off the street. These paid donations not only pose risks to patients receiving the donations but also to the actual donors.
Octapharma, one of the biggest private Pharma company from Switzerland, advertises to potential plasma donors at $900 for their first donation and it goes down to $30-$50 each time they go after.
According to CNBC, plasma clinics are set up increasingly in low-income communities, being overrepresented in high-poverty stricken areas and taking advantage of the vulnerable populations.
In a small documentary called “The Blood Business”, Jean-Francois Steiert, an expert in the Swiss health system said donating plasma is an exploitation because it enables the rich to profit off the poor by negotiating a price and referred to as “New Cannibalism” by some people.
After the economic crisis in the USA, the number of donors has increased from 15 million to 32 million people. People in plasma centers are donating up to twice a week because they lost their job, they need extra money, and is sometimes the only income for their household.
Frequent plasma donor Liz Savage said in an interview with Business Insider how she pretended she donated to help people. While she was glad it did, she only heard about it because it pays money and donated when she needed the money.
This desperation for money also causes some people to lie during their physical examination giving a high chance of the receiving patient getting complications rather than getting better. A donor in an interview with “The Blood Business” said get them what they want so we can do what we want.
While some people use plasma money to pay their rent and phone bills, others use their plasma money for buying more drugs. Many drugs taken by these people aren’t easily detectable by a simple drug test, rising questions of potential risks posed on patients that are receiving the plasma and even an epidemic crisis due to the globalization of plasma.
One example is from 1990, contaminated blood hit Europe, killing hundreds of hepatitis and transfusion patients with AIDS virus. The World Health Organization (WHO) is trying to get other countries to be self sufficient in their plasma creation because it tends to be safer and provide better access but this is hard to do due to the limited amount of people that are willing to donate as frequently as Americans do when being paid.
The Red Cross states the limit to donating plasma is once a month. On the contrary, these private plasma centers are allowing these people to donate up to twice a week. Another one of the plasma donors in “The Blood Business” said no one donates for moral reasons and it helping people is just one of the side effects.
While these plasma companies downplay the side effects from donating plasma frequently, a study from 2010 found that paid donors that sell their plasma frequently have fewer proteins in their body, which some experts state could put them at risk for infections as long as liver and kidney disorders. In the short term, plasma donors have reported to feel fatigue, tingling sensations, anemia and black outs.
“The Blood Business” interviewed, Dr. Mongouli, a doctor in Cleveland who sees many patients who have donated plasma twice a week said the patients that comes in donates plasma as a way to pay their rent or their phone bills, prioritizing that over their own health and often come in tired and have constant headaches.
From the unanswered questions of the origin of plasma, risks linked to donors and patients, drug detection, to the likelihood of future epidemics, paying people for their plasma is the problem.
A doctor in “The Blood Business” said if we’re not careful and accept an ethical shift of what donation stands for and accept to trade our bodies, then we will be capable of doing anything, starting from the blood of the poor into the veins of the rich.
