Welcome to another edition of "From Our Shelves," where I do a short book review of a book I read that our library owns.
Kathleen McLauhglin's book, Blood Money: the Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry, is a serious look at the blood trade industry in the United States, mainly focused on the blood plasma trade.
Did you know that the United States is one of a few countries in the world that allows payment for plasma donations?
Well, most Americans are happily clueless about the plasma donation industry in the United States, unless they are one of the millions who donate plasma regularly in order to make ends meet. As this book shows, the reason for donating is pretty much economics. Contrary to what the plasma companies may have you believe, that there is some altruistic reason for donating plasma, the reality in the United States is that people donate plasma in order to get money they need for things like groceries, car fuel, and rent.
An interesting angle of the book is that the author suffers from a rare medical condition that requires plasma as part of her treatment, So she is not only writing as a journalist and researcher; she has a stake in the subject matter.
If you are interested in health and medical topics, socioeconomics in the United States, and other business topics, this may be a good book for you.
Book details from the library catalog:
Blood Money by Kathleen McLaughlin
Call Number: Stacks 362.178 M161b 2023
ISBN: 9781982171964
Publication Date: 2023-02-28
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 an industry that targets America's most economically vulnerable for immense profit. Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to utilize that country's scandal-plagued plasma supply--outbreaks throughout the 1990s and early 2000s struck thousands with blood-borne diseases as impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless abandon. Instead, McLaughlin becomes her own runner, hiding American plasma in her luggage during trips from the United States to China. She finishes the job, but never could get the plasma story out of her head. Suspicions become certainties when a source from the past, a visiting Chinese researcher, warns McLaughlin of troubling echoes between America's domestic plasma supply chain and the one she'd seen spin out into chaos in China. 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. McLaughlin's findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin's personal battle to overcome illness as a working American with an electrifying exposé of capitalism run amok in a searing portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those least empowered to fight back.
Blood Money by
