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

by Rose George

The number of people donating plasma had risen as dramatically as the number of Americans living in extreme poverty, according to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, two sociologists who published $2.00 a Day, a book about modern American poverty. Over ten years from 2006, the number of people selling plasma grew threefold, to 32.6 million.45 According to figures from the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, an industry body, they were donating more frequently. Today, according to the $2.00 a Day blog, “there are over 500 commercial plasma donation centers scattered across the country, most of which are disproportionately positioned in or around poor areas, where the most likely donors, the impoverished, reside. Of these centers, 100 opened their doors during the Great Recession and almost 200 have opened within the last decade.”