‘Friends, their children, colleagues and acquaintances have confessed to me, often in jokes and lowered voices, that they sold plasma to get through rough financial patches.’ Photograph: Future Publishing/Getty Images Then right above to it, what appeared to be a job ad caught my eye. Inside the stall, I glanced at one of those routine bathroom ads for a bail bondsman. With all this rolling through my head, I got up out of my seat at the University of Montana football stadium and walked up the concrete stairs to the women’s restroom. Where wages have failed to keep pace with costs, where housing prices rise out of reach, where basics like gas can feel unattainable, blood money often fills in the gaps. The practice – seen as unsavory by many who’ve never had to rely on it – has replaced what used to account for a social safety net. Still, we’ve failed to recognize how this endeavor – something that is often marginalized and maligned – is sewn into the very fabric of American society. And college students are always using this one particularly odd income stream for books, food and beer money. We read that inflation might be driving more people to plasma centers around the country. There are the usual anecdotes of teachers selling their plasma during a strike or to make ends meet. There are scattered news stories here or there, of course, about plasma as staple of hard-luck life. Millions of plasma donors represent a substantial portion of the US population, and yet we hear little about it as a segment of the American gig economy. More than 1,000 paid plasma centers thrive across the country, often concentrated in poorer zip codes and college towns, luring in donors with financial rewards of hundreds of dollars a month if they go twice a week, and keeping them hooked on the ability to supplement their incomes. As one of only five countries – including Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Hungary – in the world that allows donors to be paid for their plasma, with a large and growing population of people on the economic ropes, the US has become a primary source provider of an essential bodily fluid that is spun into profit-making medicines. In 2021, the global blood plasma industry was valued at $24bn. The business centered on Americans’ blood plasma is a hugely profitable one. The number stunned me then, but in the bigger picture, maybe it’s not that hard to believe. It’s also a tale of a system that relies on economic precarity, a hidden part of the US economy shunted off in strip malls by the Dollar Store or relegated to the poorer sides of the tracks in major cities, in places often neglected and ignored.īy the roughest guess, working backward from the number of plasma units collected in a single year, you could surmise that up to 20 million people in the US donate or sell their blood plasma, the yellowish liquid protein component of blood, in a year. It’s a tale of Americans who sell their blood proteins to get by financially, and my own physical dependence on them (I need regular plasma injections to keep me healthy). It was a central question that had puzzled me for years. I paused for a minute and thought about it for what must have been the thousandth time.
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