Earlier in my career I was a hospital blood banker and became familiar with commercial plasma centers that paid individuals for their plasma. Here's a link to the web page of one of them currently in business: CSL Plasma. Such centers are often located in poorer sections of towns. This aligns with the notion that they cater to people down on their luck who donate their plasma because of a financial need. The plasma collected in such centers has various uses including the manufacture of components such as albumin and coagulation factors. I had largely forgotten about this plasma industry until I read a recent article in the New York Times (see: What Is the Blood of a Poor Person Worth?). Below is an excerpt from the NYT piece:
The plasma business is booming in the United States, with the number of collection centers ...more than doubling since 2005, and global sales roughly quadrupling since 2000 to be more than $21 billion in 2017. Many developed countries have banned paying people for their blood, but not the United States. Blood products made up 1.9 percent of all American exports in 2016, more than soybeans, more than computers....[T]here is an underside to all that growth: The industry depends on the blood of the very poor. Ethicists, 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? ....[P]lasma companies locate their collection centers disproportionately in destitute neighborhoods, according to...[a researcher on this topic] “They’re surgically placing these,” she said. Healthy people can donate plasma twice a week, up to 104 times a year. The plasma industry says that most people do not donate so frequently and that there are minimal health risks involved, but other researchers disagree. One 2010 study found that paid donors who sell their plasma frequently have fewer proteins in their blood, which some experts say could put them at risk for infections and liver and kidney disorders....
Here's another article on this same topic: Lift bans on paying for human-blood plasma. For me, the fascinating revelation in they NYT article was the size of the plasma business. Keep in mind the distinction between whole blood collection and plasma collection from the FDA perspective. The FDA requires that blood must be labeled as either "paid-for" or voluntary; Red Cross will not handle the commercial product. However, this F.D.A. labeling requirement does not apply to plasma because it is split into components before being administered to a patent (see: Why you get paid to donate plasma but not blood). Part of the huge global market for albumin is undoubtedly demand in China. Here are some more details about this aspect of the global demand for serum albumin (see: The big business of blood plasma):
China, a country that holds the questionable honour of being a world leader in liver disease, is now also the highest consumer of serum albumin, using 300 tonnes annually, roughly half of the worldwide total use....Serum albumin is most commonly derived from blood plasma, and over half of the albumin in China is imported. This increasing demand is driving up prices, and fake products billed as albumin have been found. Liver disease is a growing problem in China, primarily because of the high burden of viral hepatitis in Asia, but also because of the growing prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
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