Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

by Rose George

Plasma companies collect it from paid donors using aphaeresis machines, which spin whole blood, retain the plasma, and return the rest to the recipient. This is source plasma, and it is purified for its components such as immunoglobulins, which boost immune deficiencies, or albumin, the most common plasma protein, which can maintain blood volume and pressure. These components have come to be known as plasma protein therapeutics. A unit of FFP is cheap: the NHS sells one for under £30 ($42).2 A fraction of source plasma is not. The most popular, intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), often costs more than gold (the NHS buys it for about £35 [$49] a gram),3 and one plasma donation can reap medicines worth ten times what a donor is paid (usually about $30). Human and animal blood is the thirteenth most traded commodity in the world, worth $252 billion. Most of that is products derived from plasma, and most of it is coming from the United States, the largest exporter of plasma. In 2016, the category of “human and animal blood”—actually mostly blood fractions such as plasma products—earned the United States $19 billion, close to what it got from selling medium-size cars or soybeans.4 The chief of America’s Blood Centers, an association of blood banks, has called it the OPEC of plasma.5 Half of Europe’s plasma for medicinal products comes from American veins.