No, that’s the TGOP / Nazi fanboys.
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The reason Europe is importing blood from USia, has to do with mad cow disease. Its impossible to screen for, so they have to get product that hasn’t had any (known) human outbreaks.
I finf this troubling because it means there’s even more incentive over here, to not look for something you’d rather not find.
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This is horrific and should be immediately outlawed. A couple passages of the article that stood out to me:
“Every week, thousands of Mexicans enter the U.S. on temporary visas to sell their blood to for-profit pharmaceutical corporations. The practice is banned on health grounds in Mexico but is completely legal north of the border. there are at least 43 blood donation centers along the border that prey primarily on Mexican nationals in a legally ambiguous practice”
and
" Teenager blood is in high demand in, of all places, Silicon Valley, where anti-aging technologies are the latest trend. One company, Ambrosia, charges $8,000 per treatment to aging tech executives, infusing them with the blood of the young, turning these individuals into bloodsuckers in more ways than one."
I knew that Theil was a capitalist vampire, but not literally. FUCK!
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Same way countries can have strict environmental and worker protection laws and still import goods from countries with lax or no rules. It’s not their problem. I suspect when you import from a rich democracy like USA many don’t even consider the possibility that the blood may be unethically procured. It would be different if it was Bangladesh suddenly offering lots of blood for sale.
I did this - donating blood plasma twice every week - during a stretch after college when I was in a depressed city and couldn’t get a good job. I delivered papers, worked for $4.25 an hour at a greenhouse, and donated plasma. The plasma paid for food, 24 bucks a week of rice and beans and discount vegetables.
It didn’t kill me. I don’t think it did any harm at all. I was a healthy young man and grew back that plasma fast. I really hated the cold centrifuged blood coming back into my arm - felt like the kiss of death - and I’ll be damned if that place wasn’t full of junkies. The rudimentary HIV question ritual (night sweats, lymph palpitation, are you gay, do you shoot up) took seconds, and anybody who looked around them knew we weren’t all clean. Because who the hell sells their plasma twice for 24 bucks a week on shitty vinyl recliners watching BET?
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Mintpressnews misinterpreted its sources, causing incorrect headlines both here and on the original JWZ post. That 2% figure includes both human and animal blood; it’s not all “the blood of poor Americans”.
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mintpressnews has quite a reputation.
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I’d like to see a breakdown of that number, too. I know very little about ag econ, so I have no idea what else might fall into that universe.
Which isn’t to say folks who sell their blood ought to not have the advantages of some reasonable regulation/transparency.
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I did this while I was living in Kansas City and it was an absolutely awful way to get by, but it was the difference between having a home and being homeless. The article really skates over some of the awful things done by the industry. They are fond of giving out their payment as debit cards with assorted fees and minimum balance requirements. This is on top of generally having payment formulas that pretty much just manage to keep it legal to advertise high rates, while actually paying out half as much.
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I always found it strange the way they asked about it because they just say “Have you lived in the UK during [some period]”.
Are people there not able to donate blood at all?
This sounds extremely naïve and it looks like there is a real effort for self-delusion.
If you ban the practice because of ethical reasons, you already know that it can only be done in a exploitative way wherever it is.
If there was a way to do it ethically, they would have implemented it.
The case of asbestos show that it doesn’t have to be like that
If you still accept to buy from a country with different rules, you are clearly saying that those poor humans worth less than your citizens and you are the main responsible for their suffering.
I’ve donated over a hundred times, so far, all unpaid (except for the post-donation biscuits and crackers, which I raid mercilessly). For a long time I had a personal goal to donate my body weight, but I blew through that and just kept going. Here the interval is 4/year for whole blood (min. interval 12 weeks), and 1/fortnight for plasma or platelets. And yes; you can therefore safely assume that most of my donations were plasma 
Which reminds me … I need to make another booking before Xmas.
Paying donors^ is fucking weird. And sketchy. On the other hand, the US health system appears to be so thoroughly borked that you may as well pay the donors/sellers. Let them get something out of the system.
(^apart from everything else, at that point you stop being a ‘donor’ and become a ‘seller’)
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Desperate Americans are allowed to donate twice per week (104 times per year).
Do they have different frequency cutoffs if you’re not desperate?
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I’m going for donated blood amount instead of number of donations, having donated you weight in blood seems more interesting than 100 or 1000 donations.
I’m not sure if I’m absolutely opposed to paying for blood, it is too precious for some people (not the assholes that think they can live forever like a vampire) and having it depending solely on donors doesn’t work (I always get messages from the local blood center that their stock is getting critically low).
Trying to minimize the cost is what it makes it sketchy, and I wonder how they still haven’t a contamination problem going on.
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A long time ago.
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Yeah… I know…
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I was a freshly divorced single mother and did this for 6 month. It really messed up my lady hormones.
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Agreed. Although, the blood service here did give me a rather nice art print as a ?reward?prize?thanks? after 100.
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At least historically, the willingness to see no inconvenient evil existed among both producers and purchasers.
The later stages, where it was a known problem, but switching to heat-treated products was just too much of a bother, were particularly unflattering for those calling the shots. Not that it caught up with them or anything; but still.
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It would all have been moot for me. 4th time giving blood I flunked my hepatitis test. Double checked that with the doc right away for results that said “nope but this elevated reading there is what they dinged you for”.
Alas I can’t give anymore. Well I guess it was for myself I could do it.
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This reminds me of a documentary I saw sometime back about blood donation, both volunteer and paid.
It is a particularly interesting case of economics in which the quality of a product actually goes up the less you are offering to pay for it. Volunteer donations come from people that are significantly healthier than those that give paid donations. Not surprising when you think about it bit, but fascinating idea nonetheless.
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