![]() The plasma industry says that most people do not donate so frequently and that there are minimal health risks involved, but other researchers disagree. Healthy people can donate plasma twice a week, up to 104 times a year. “They’re surgically placing these,” she said. You see mothers, you see students, you see employed people, you see unemployed people,” said Jan Bult, the group’s president and chief executive.īut plasma companies locate their collection centers disproportionately in destitute neighborhoods, according to Heather Olsen, who, as a graduate student researcher at Case Western Reserve University, examined 40 years of data on collection centers across the country. “When I go to centers, what I see in those centers is people of all walks of life. The Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, a trade group, disputes the idea that the industry depends on desperate people. But there is an underside to all that growth: The industry depends on the blood of the very poor.Įthicists, sociologists, business executives and “plassers” themselves, as the donors are sometimes called, are increasingly asking: Is the business exploitative, taking advantage of desperate people? Or is it beneficial, offering much-needed income to those who have few avenues to make money? Should we encourage people to sell their lifeblood so frequently, or make it harder to do so? The market for those medicines is “projected to grow radiantly by 2023,” according to a report from Market Research Future. It’s used to create lifesaving medicines for people with hemophilia, immune disorders, burns and other painful conditions, and it cannot be replicated in a lab. Plasma - the golden liquid that transports red and white blood cells and proteins through our bodies - is something of an elixir. Blood products made up 1.9 percent of all American exports in 2016, more than soybeans, more than computers. Many developed countries have banned paying people for their blood, but not the United States. The plasma business is booming in the United States, with the number of collection centers like this one more than doubling since 2005, and global sales roughly quadrupling since 2000 to be more than $21 billion in 2017. “I’m doing it for him, I guess you could say.” She earns about $30 each time she donates. Watson, 46, said, as she waited in line to get her vitals taken. ![]() “What always brings me here is money,” Ms. ![]() So, on a crisp Monday morning in November, she traveled 40 minutes by bus to CSL Plasma, a blood plasma collection center wedged between a Dollar Tree and a Wells Fargo bank in a strip mall in North Philadelphia. She didn’t have cash, but she did have something she could sell quickly and legally - her blood. Her son had called her that morning from prison, where he is serving a life sentence, to ask her to make a deposit in his phone account. PHILADELPHIA - Jacqueline Watson needed money. ![]()
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