Blood Money
The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A “haunting” (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even) and deeply personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit.
Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable.
So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing a “vampiric real-life story of modern-day greed” (Leah Sottile, host of Bundyville). Assigned to work in China, where the plasma supply had been rocked by numerous scandals, McLaughlin hid American plasma in her luggage during trips between the two countries. And when she was warned by a Chinese researcher of troubling echoes between America’s domestic plasma supply chain and the one she’d seen spin out into chaos in China, she knew she had to dig deeper.
Blood Money shares McLaughlin’s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit—a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America’s southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay.
This “captivating and anguished exposé” (Publishers Weekly) weaves together McLaughlin’s personal battle to overcome illness while also facing her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation with an electrifying portrait of big business run amok.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Blending memoir and reportage, journalist McLaughlin debuts with a disturbing look at the predatory nature of the blood plasma industry. Plasma, "the watery, yellowish protein compound of blood," is collected by hooking donors up to a centrifuge so their blood can be extracted, spun into its parts, and infused back into the donor's arm. One of only five countries that allows payment for plasma donors, the U.S. is the primary source of the world's supply, and McLaughlin, who suffers from a rare nerve disease treated with infusions of a plasma-borne medicine, profiles sellers, many of whom come from "economically disadvantaged" communities like Flint, Mich., and El Paso, Tex., where donation centers thrive. About 10,000 Mexicans cross the border into the U.S. each week to sell their plasma, she notes. McLaughlin also sketches the history of the plasma economy in the Chinese province of Henan, which became ground zero for a devastating AIDS outbreak in the 1990s. Throughout, she interweaves shocking revelations about lax regulations, tainted blood, and potential side effects for frequent donors with piercing meditations on how it feels to know that her medication "is built on the backs of quiet, hidden economic desperation." The result is a captivating and anguished exposé.
