> In the mid-1980s, just as the Aids crisis peaked and US scientists discovered the virus that caused the disease was borne by blood, American drug companies knowingly sold HIV-tainted blood products in Asia.
It wasn't just an American company, there were actually two companies, Bayer (German) and Baxter (American). Baxter have a history of very shady things, I'm surprised they're around. I wish the author cite the quote or more clear on that part.
"Cryosan had a shady reputation in the medical industry. It had been nabbed importing blood taken from Russian cadavers and relabeling it as though it was from Swedish volunteers."
and Arkansas way of screening for HIV:
"Pine Bluffs president Jimmy Lord dismissed such concerns and suggested that AIDs was not a problem in Arkansas. “If anyone got caught in a homosexual act,” Lords said, “we took them off the roster.”"
> In 1895, the German drug company Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as an over-the-counter drug under the trademark name Heroin.[69] It was developed chiefly as a morphine substitute for cough suppressants that did not have morphine's addictive side-effects. Morphine at the time was a popular recreational drug, and Bayer wished to find a similar but non-addictive substitute to market. However, contrary to Bayer's advertising as a "non-addictive morphine substitute," heroin would soon have one of the highest rates of addiction among its users.[70]
I'd tend to agree, but yet they went with Bayer. I guess Bayer's history is a little more buried while Monsanto's flagship product is currently getting sued to oblivion.
This is a really interesting article that highlights for me a concept that is foreign: paid blood donation.
I was well aware of the exploitation of paid US blood donors (for those who have not taken the time to read the article, or are familiar with the history, paid donation comes about with an enormous decrease in voluntary donation, ie. ‘the death of civic duty’.
Aus which is a net plasma exporter and which is a volunteer only country has a strange situation where the Red Cross accepts voluntary donations but then gives (?sells - it was nice and simple when the C in CSL stood for commonwealth) it to other companies which refine it, is predicted to be unable to meet its needs should it introduce paid donations) and i’m not overly surprised to hear of exploitation of Chinese donors.
So nothing so new here.
I will say however that the authour throwing ‘we don’t know what will happen to plasma donors’:
>Apart from economic exploitation, the risk to long-term donors is unknown. The product insert that comes with my Baxter-branded Gammagard immunoglobin stretches several feet long and lists everything from blood clots to fever and chills as possible side-effects. For me, an infusion means feeling, at best, like I have the flu for a few days every six weeks. I don’t know what happens to people who give raw materials, so I watch my infusion nurse – the donor – as much as she watches me.
So the authour has an autoimmune condition that requires the infusion of IVIG every 4-6 weeks or so. Awful condition, great and successful treatment.
I still can’t get behind an elaborate statement designed to cast doubt on the safety of (appropriately scheduled) donation, and actually it is so far from a plausible scientific mechanism of causing harm that I have to call it out. Back in Med school we used to joke about blood/plasma donation as a form of weight loss (‘I just gave away 250g of cells!) - the body then has to spend about x2 that in raw energy in the anabolic process of recreating those cells. The rates of donation that are talked about though, of 2 times a week, are so far above what is allowed in a rational donor program (Red Cross Australia only allows a plasma donation once a month). Still, in a healthy person, that would not be an overt drain on the body’s Capacity to recover.
Really interesting article though and I hope everyone learned something!
> This is a really interesting article that highlights for me a concept that is foreign: paid blood donation.
The US does not permit paid blood donation, and this article is not about paid blood donation. It's about paid PLASMA donation. Plasma is 1 of 3 components of blood. Blood donations in the US are unpaid (as long as you don't count that free t-shirt or free movie ticket as compensation).
*In High School I ran my schools 3 annual blood drives and completed all the associated training to do the drives. During the 2 years (and 6 drives) I ran the program, we broke the state record for High School donations 3 times. I personally was a whole blood gallon donor before graduating High School. I've also done plasma donations, concentrated red cell donations, and platelet donations; so I've donated the whole spectrum :)
Your comment about rates of donation caused me to check what the frequency of donation for whole blood in other countries is compared to the US. I was surprised to see that England and Australia both have 12 week periods (at least for men), while the US allows donations every 8 weeks. What’s interesting to me is that the last time I went to donate they had a new info sheet regarding post donation iron deficiency [0] for frequent donors, and I saw that one of the things the FDA was considering was increasing the period between donations. That a majority of the non-supplemented participants hadn’t regained their pre-donation iron levels after 24 weeks was surprising and caused me to start consciously increasing my iron intake after donating (along with starting iron supplements). That study contrasted with a more recent study that found no major downsides to the 8 week interval [1].
Starts off extraordinary then gets more so, as it goes into the world of for-profit blood and plasma transfusion in China and the US. And the consequences of the HIV epidemic.
Something like 1.3% of US exports are blood and blood products.
Plasma is an industry there.
Meanwhile, in Canada, we’re steadfast against paid donations. But the volunteer model doesn’t generate enough blood products, so we have to import from the US too.
Edit: I had said 3%, but it’s 1.3%. Still a lot in the grand scheme of things.
> Meanwhile, in Canada, we’re steadfast against paid donations. But the volunteer model doesn’t generate enough blood products, so we have to import from the US too.
Steadfast against paid donations, but yet willing to import paid-donation blood? Wouldn't it be better to regulate your own for-profit blood donation system than it is to trust that the US (or any other country) is doing things the way you want?
I suppose the idea is that discouraging it domestically will eventually catch up to the demand. But if you allow prostituting of blood domestically you'll never get there?
Mostly correct. Canada (and most other countries with a volunteer system) are self-sufficient for blood, but not self-sufficient for plasma (a blood product).
The countries that do paid plasma donations end up supplying (and profiting from) countries with only volunteer plasma donor systems.
> Use all capitals if an abbreviation is pronounced as the individual letters (an initialism): BBC, CEO, US, VAT, etc; if it is an acronym (pronounced as a word) spell out with initial capital, eg Nasa, Nato, Unicef, unless it can be considered to have entered the language as an everyday word, such as awol, laser and, more recently, asbo, pin number and sim card. Note that pdf and plc are lowercase.
The simplest reason would be that "AIDS" is pronounced as a word, like "LASER", "SONAR", or "SCOTUS", while "HIV" is pronounced as a series of three letters. The pronunciation of HIV makes it essentially impossible to spell it with lowercase letters ("OK" being the only exception that comes to mind).
I could not read the actual article- seems some script in one of the adds was redirecting me to some spammy Win $1000 sweepstakes every time I clicked the link. Did that happen to anyone else? (Using mobile safari)
I admittedly couldn't read more than a paragraph in it due to phobic trigger reasons but it is striking that it is real. Inspired by GURPS listing blood as an illegal substance for dependencies (since obtaining it for vampiric consumption would not be legal). Previously I joked about bugs in game law systems making everybody living automatically guilty of illegal substance smuggling for having blood and causing every official to react accordingly - a bystander gets shot and they arrest them for being caught smuggling.
It wasn't just an American company, there were actually two companies, Bayer (German) and Baxter (American). Baxter have a history of very shady things, I'm surprised they're around. I wish the author cite the quote or more clear on that part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_International#1996_Japa...