Nine Pints Quotes

“Monks were supposed to be celibate, and chronic and enforced celibacy was thought to entail a dangerous buildup of semen (retentio semenis), which could lead to blood poisoning.21”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“White blood cells are removed from all donations—a process called leukodepletion—because it is in white cells that many infections travel, including the prions that cause variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a vile and violent affliction that anyone growing up in the 1980s will visualize as piles of burning cattle and skeletal humans who fall when they walk because their brains are degenerating.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“Scientists such as Jonathan Quick of the Harvard Medical School believe there will be another major outbreak of something – in our air, food, or blood – in the next fifty years.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood

“But already blood is a surveillance camera, the widest window with the best view into my past, present, and predictable future. Blood is one of the three main diagnostic tools of a doctor: the others are imaging and a physical exam.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“She squints into the distance, this young woman who looks strong but who statistics say is still too vulnerable to violence and abuse and infection. I want her to triumph because she deserves to. I know that countless people are working ferociously to find cures, solutions, innovations, outreach, to marshal every weapon against HIV. I know all that and try to remember it. But I also know the numbers. So I see this young black woman looking into the distance, and I see her seeing that HIV is coming. It is still coming despite our best efforts and it is coming for her.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“There is nothing like it. It is stardust and the sea. The iron in our blood comes from the death of supernovas, like all iron on our planet.5 This bright red liquid—brighter in the arteries, when it is transporting oxygen around the body from the heart, duller in the veins, when it is not—contains salt and water, like the sea we possibly came from.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“historical, political, social, biological, and moral aspects of blood”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“India’s Supreme Court banned the sale of blood in 1996.43 It has also banned untouchability. Both bans are equally flexibly interpreted and both banned activities flourish happily. In 2008, for example, police acting on a tip-off raided a series of squalid tin sheds near Gorakhpur, Madhya Pradesh, and found blood slaves.44 As Scott Carney reported in The Red Market, poor migrant men were kept in sheds by a local dairy farmer, Pappu Yadhav, and persistently bled to the point of death. Police found five sheds and freed seventeen men, who had been bled twice a week. Some had been imprisoned for two and a half years. Hemoglobin levels in a normal adult male should be 14 to 18 grams per deciliter of blood. The blood slaves had 4 grams.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

“The fact that O-type people are more susceptible to cholera was first noticed in 1977. During Peru’s 1991 epidemic, people with O blood were eight times more likely to be hospitalized.20 People from the Ganges delta, where cholera has always been endemic, have the lowest rate of O type anywhere.”
― Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood