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by
Rose George
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November 5 - November 11, 2020
Daily, the blood’s thirty trillion red cells do a full circuit of the body, travelling about twelve thousand miles, three times the distance from my front door to Novosibirsk. The circulatory system of veins, arteries, and capillaries is about sixty thousand miles long, twice the circumference of the earth and more.
Visiting British journalists are not going to fill the hole in India’s blood supply. They shouldn’t accept my blood anyway: like anyone else who was born in Britain or living there before 1996, I am a global pariah. Until a cure is found for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, whose infectious prion particles can live for years undetected in our bodies, my blood is considered unsafe anywhere outside my island.
I weigh 65 kilograms. Eight per cent of 65 kilograms is 5.2 kilograms. Converting kilograms to pints (though it’s mass to liquid) gets 9.15 pints.
‘A Light-Hearted Look at a Lion-Hearted Organ (or, a Perspective from Three Standard Deviations Beyond the Norm). Part 1 (of Two Parts)’,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8356455_A_light-hearted_look_at_a_lion-hearted_organ_or_a_perspective_from_three_standard_deviations_beyond_the_norm_Part_1_of_two_parts
The plan was for twelve pairs of pigeons to carry blood on their backs in a special container. ‘A taxi takes on average 12 minutes to arrive at Devonport hospital,’ said Hilary Sanders, whose idea it was, ‘and another 10 minutes to complete the journey. A pigeon would cover the two-and-a-half miles in less than five minutes.’ A hospital worker reported seeing only one pigeon take off with a sample. It was never seen again. Sarah Waddington, ‘Plymouth’s Crazy Idea to Fly Blood Samples Between Hospitals – by Pigeon’, Plymouth Herald, 10 February 2018.
Nikhil M. Babu, ‘Inside India’s Blood Black Market’, Business Standard (India), 24 December 2016, www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/inside-india-s-blood-black-market-116122400708_1.html (accessed 3 October 2010).
There was hardly any disease or condition for which bloodletting was not thought useful: it was even used to treat severe bleeding.
Annelida,
The bleeding barber is the reason modern barbers display red-and-white-striped poles: the pole was a stick for the patient to grip; the white strips were the bandages, the red strips the blood. The ball on the top was probably a deformation of the blood-gathering bowl.
The first to succeed was a M. Béchade of the Gironde in France, who in 1835 invented a revolting method of sending horses, donkeys, and cows into ponds for leeches to feed on.36 When the animals showed an understandable aversion to being cut open and sent into the ponds, they were strapped into a box, wheeled into the ponds, and bled anyway. Elderly horses were often chosen for this fate. It was, wrote Claude Seignolle, like condemning the old horse – who had given years of loyal service – to ‘two deaths’, and the first was the more horrible of the two.37
The calin binds to collagen, which would normally bind to platelets, aiding them to aggregate and form a clot. Biopharm researchers have likened this to ‘collagen-coating paint’. Roy T. Sawyer, ‘Novel Cardiovascular Drugs from Bloodsucking Animals’,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281206415_SAWYER_RT_1991_'Novel_pharmaceuticals_from_bloodsucking_animals'_In_Advances_in_the_Treatment_of_Myocardial_Infarction_An_International_Conference_11-12_April_1991_13_pp
The system of widespread donation of blood by anonymous volunteers, and its transfusion into people who need it, dates back not even a century. In England, the National Health Service Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) began as the Blood Transfusion Service in 1946;
She saw that poverty is deadly. ‘How anyone could do medicine in those days,’ she wrote, ‘and not become a socialist I find hard to understand. What I hated most was people’s acceptance: “Yes, I have had seven children and buried six, it was God’s will.” I hated God’s will with a burning hatred.’
the same working people who flock on the highway bridges and train station of Khayelitsha in the pre-dawn hours, a murmuration of humans waiting for their ride to where the work is.
My stomach dropped, a sign that my body had diverted blood to my legs and arms away from my gut, in case I needed to run.
‘Older Men and Young Women Drive South African HIV Epidemic’,
https://www.nature.com/news/older-men-and-young-women-drive-south-african-hiv-epidemic-1.20273
Human and animal blood is the thirteenth most traded commodity in the world, worth £187,000 million.
In 2016, the category of ‘human and animal blood’ – actually mostly blood fractions such as plasma products – earned the United States $19 billion (£14 million), close to what it got from selling medium-sized cars or soybeans.4 The chief of America’s Blood Centers, an association of blood banks, has called the US the OPEC of plasma.5 Half of Europe’s plasma for medicinal products comes from American veins.6
Companies such as Baxter, Grifols, and Octapharma, which control the industry and which are vast conglomerates with secretive billionaire bosses (in the case of Octapharma), set up clinics in skid rows and prisons all over the country.
In Cummins Unit, a jail in Grady, Arkansas, seventy miles south of Little Rock, a plasma centre had been running since 1963. Prisoners were given $7 (£5.20) in exchange, and the plasma was sold for $100 (£75) a donation. They queued up in the centre to lie down on cots and sell. They were ‘like little cows’, said an official who worked with Bill Clinton, twice governor of Arkansas.20 The little cows were milked and business was good. In 1974, the prison began selling to a company called Health Management Associates. HMA sold the plasma to North American Biologics, a subsidiary of Continental
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By the mid-1980s, heat treatment was adopted as standard, but some companies continued to export their old, unheated inventory. Cutter sold it to Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Argentina, Japan, and Indonesia, exporting more than one hundred thousand vials of unsafe, unheated concentrate – even though by then it produced heated product, too – and earned more than $4 million. In response, Bayer officials told the New York Times that Cutter had behaved ‘responsibly, ethically and humanely’.30
In the UK, haemophiliacs were used as guinea pigs. Or chimps, actually. In a 1982 letter, Professor Arthur Bloom, a haematologist at the Oxford haemophilia centre where Neil Weller was treated, proposed testing the new heat-treated product on haemophiliacs. It had been tested previously on chimpanzees, but animal testing was expensive. Bloom decided that quality controls would be better – and less costly – if they were carried out on haemophiliacs who had not yet been exposed to large pooled products.34 The candidates were called PUPs, for previously untreated patients. Most were children. No
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The Red Cross, which had done most of the collecting and had continued to distribute tainted Factor long after concerns were raised about its safety, was fired from blood services.
‘They Were Cheap and They Were Available: Prisoners as Research Subjects in Early Twentieth Century America’,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2127868/pdf/9418095.pdf
By 1945, 71,350 felons had given 100,000 pints of blood. Lederer, Flesh and Blood, p.93.
‘Bloody Awful: How Money and Politics Contaminated Arkansas’s Prison Plasma Program’,
https://arktimes.com/general/top-stories/2007/08/17/bloody-awful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_8:_The_Arkansas_Prison_Blood_Scandal
Lucy Reynolds, ‘Selling Our Safety to the Highest Bidder: The Privatisation of Plasma Resources UK’, openDemocracy UK, 24 April 2013. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/lucy-reynolds/selling-our-safety-to-highest-bidder-privatisation-of-plasma-resources-uk (accessed July 2018)
After that, there is a four-hour drive on a road that is mostly potholes linked by afterthoughts of tarmac.
You can touch something and not be dirty, but you are unclean. You can bathe in the shit-filled Ganges and be filthy, but you are clean. Mary Douglas once wrote that to understand purity rules, you have to ask whom they exclude. ‘The only thing that is universalistic about purity is the temptation to use it as a weapon.’
The FDA does not require manufacturers to list ingredients on the packaging, unlike with food items. If we were inserting lollipops in our vaginas, we’d know a lot more about them.
persistent organic pollutants (POPs),
Incinerators are rare and can have unpleasant environmental impacts if used at scale. Also, burning menstrual cloth is thought to bring on infertility. Burying pads is time-consuming and modern sanitary plastic-filled pads can take up to 800 years to decompose. In a study in Bihar, nearly 60 per cent of women simply chucked their used pads and cloths into fields and roadsides.
Other women thankfully resort to knockoffs, not sex. Sanitary pads can be faked like anything else. Lebanese customs officials recently seized a half-ton shipment of sanitary pads that were found to be severely radioactive. The pads were made in China by a company claiming they contained anions, groups of negatively charged ionized atoms that apparently had health benefits if you put them in your pants and bled into them. (Another name for anions, the company said, was ‘air vitamins’.)60 A writer on one Chinese blog, pleased with himself, wrote that the products were ‘guaranteed to redefine
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In the UK the Conservative government pledged to remove the tax, did nothing, then used £250,000 of sanitary product tax revenue to fund an anti-abortion charity (despite promising that tampon tax revenues would support women’s shelters).
‘Dioxins and Their Effects on Human Health’, World Health Organization, Fact Sheet, October 2016, www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs225/en/ (accessed 11 April 2018).
The UK government has since pledged to use £15 million of tampon tax revenue to fund ‘projects that tackle sexual violence, address social exclusion and improve mental health and wellbeing’. My mental health and well-being would be improved by free sanitary products. Ben Quinn, ‘Anti-abortion Life Charity Will Get Cash from UK Tampon Tax’, Guardian, 28 October 2017. ‘Women and Girls Set to Benefit from £15 Million Tampon Tax Fund’, UK government, press release, 26 March 2018, www.gov.uk/government/news/women-and-girls-set-to-benefit-from-15-million-tampon-tax-fund.
Gloria Steinem, ‘If Men Could Menstruate’, Ms, October 1978.
http://ww3.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/p109g/steinem.menstruate.html
fuel tank.
Fuel line
moulages
‘Major Scientific Lessons Learned in the Trauma Field over the Last Two Decades’,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5497952/
admire a satirical show named Silicon Valley
Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians
