Selling Blood is Big Business

RED GOLD! As the nickname suggests, this is a highly valued substance. It is a precious liquid, a crucial natural resource that has been compared not only gold but also oil and coal. But is not red gold extracted from the veins of the rocks with drills and dynamite. It is extracted from the veins of people very subtle way.

Please, my little girl needs blood, pleading for a sign that looms over a busy avenue in New York City. Other advertisements urge: If you are a donor, you are the type of this world can not live without. Their blood counts. Borrow one arm.

People who want to help others apparently get the message. They line up in droves around the world. No doubt most of them and the people that collect blood and the people transfusing blood, sincerely want to help the victims and think they do.

But after blood is donated and before it is transfused, it passes through several hands and undergo more procedures than most of us realize. Like gold, blood inspires greed. It can be sold with a profit, and then resold at a higher profit. Some people struggle over the rights to collect blood, they sell it at exorbitant prices, they are making fortunes from it, and even smuggle it from one country to another. The world over, selling blood is big business.

In the U.S., donors once paid directly into their blood. But in 1971 the British writer Richard Titmuss charged that in order to lure the poor and sick to donate blood to create a couple of dollars, the U.S. system were uncertain. He also argued that it was immoral for people to benefit from giving their blood to help others. His attacks prompted a halt to the paying of whole blood donors in the U.S. (although the system still thrives in some countries). But it did not make the blood market was somewhat less profitable. Why?

How Blood remained profitable

In the 1940's, scientists began to separate blood into its components. The process, now called fractionation, makes blood an even more lucrative business. How? Well, consider: When dismantled and parts sold, a late model car can reach up to five times its value when intact. Similarly, blood is worth much more when it is divided and its parts sold separately.

Plasma, which represents about half the total blood volume is a particularly profitable blood component. Since plasma has none of the cellular blood components-red cells, white cells and platelets, it can be dried and stored. In addition, a donor allowed to give blood only five times a year, but he can give plasma up to twice a week if they undergo plasmapheresis. In this process, whole blood is extracted, the plasma separated, and then cellular components are reinfused into the donor.

U.S. still allows donors to receive payment for their plasma. Moreover, the State allows donors to give about four times more plasma a year than the World Health Organization recommends! Little wonder that the USA brings together over 60 percent of the world's plasma supply. All this plasma itself is worth about $ 450 million, but it downloads much more on the market because the plasma can also be divided into different ingredients. Worldwide, plasma is the basis of a 2 billion dollar a year industry!

Japan, the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, consumes about one third of the world's plasma. This country imports 96 percent of this blood component, mostly from the U.S.. Critics in Japan have called this country vampire in the world and the Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry has tried to crack down on the trade say it is unfair to take advantage of blood. In fact, the Ministry fees medical institutions in Japan to make some 200 million U.S. dollars in profits every year from just one plasma component, albumin.

Germany consumes more blood products than the rest of Europe combined, more per person than any country in the world. The book Zum Beispiel Blut (eg Blood) says of blood products: More than half is imported, mainly from the United States but also from the third world. In any event, from the poor who want to improve their income by donating plasma. Some of these poor people sell as much of their blood that they die of blood loss.

Many commercial plasma centers are strategically located in low-income areas or along the borders of the poorest countries. They prefer the impoverished and derelict, which is all too willing to trade plasma for money and have ample reason to give more than they should or hiding any diseases they might harbor. Such plasma traffic encountered in 25 countries worldwide. As soon as it stopped in a country, it pops up in another. Bribery of officials, and smuggling is not uncommon.

Profit in the Nonprofit Realm

But nonprofit blood banks has also come under fierce criticism last. In 1986, reporter Andrea Rock charged in Money magazine, a unit of blood costs $ 57.50 blood banks to collect from donors that it costs hospitals $ 88.00 to buy it from blood banks, and that it costs patients from $ 375 to $ 600 to receive it in a transfusion.

The situation has changed since then? In September 1989, reporter Gilbert M. Gaul of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a series of newspaper articles about the U.S. blood-banking system. After a year long study, he reported that some blood banks beg people to donate blood, and then turn around and sell as much as half of that blood to other blood centers, with a considerable profit. Gaul is estimated that blood banks are trading around one million pints [half a million liters] of blood each year in this way in a shadowy existence $ 50,000,000 a year market that operates somewhat like a stock exchange.

A crucial difference, however: This blood exchange are not monitored by the government. No one can measure the exact extent of it, let alone regulate its prices. And many blood donors know anything about it. People get tricked, a retired blood banker told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Nobody tells them that their blood will be us. They would be furious if they knew about it. A Red Cross official put it succinctly: Blood bankers have for years deceived the U.S. public.

In the U.S. alone, blood banks collect some 13.5 million pints [6500000 L] of blood every year and they sell over 30 million units of blood products to about one billion U.S. dollars. This is a huge amount of money. Blood banks do not use the term profit. They prefer the term excesses of expenditure. Red Cross, for example, made $ 300 million excesses of expenditure from 1980 to 1987.

The blood banks protest that they are nonprofit organizations. They argue that unlike large companies on Wall Street, their money does not go to shareholders. But if the Red Cross had shareholders, will be among the most profitable companies in the U.S. by General Motors. And blood-bank officials have nice salaries. For officials in 62 blood banks surveyed by The Philadelphia Inquirer, 25 percent made more than $ 100,000 a year. Some more than twice as much.

Blood bankers also argue that they do not sell blood, they collect, they only charge processing fees. A blood banker retorts to this argument: It drives us crazy when the Red Cross says it does not sell blood. It's like the supermarket says they are only charging you for the box, and no milk.