Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

by David Quammen

Plasma, the liquid component of blood (minus the cells), is valuable stuff for its antibodies and albumin and clotting factors. Demand for it rose sharply during the period around 1970, and to meet the demand a process called plasmapheresis was developed. Plasmapheresis entails drawing blood from a donor, separating the cells from the plasma by means of filtering or centrifuging, putting the cells back into the donor, and keeping the plasma as a harvested product. One advantage of this process is that it allows donors (who are usually in fact sellers, paid for their trouble and needing the money) to be tapped often rather than just a couple times per year. Giving up your plasma, for the good of others or for profit, doesn’t leave you anemic. You can go back and give again the following week. One disadvantage of the procedure—and it’s a huge one, but wasn’t recognized in the early days—is that a plasmapheresis machine, gargling your blood and the blood of many other donors over the course of days, can infect you with a blood-borne virus.

Plasma donation and HIV