BLOOD MONEY

A disquieting book examines a dark corner of American life.

If there was any doubt that the country’s wealth gap has grown untenably wide, this book dispels it. In her debut book, McLaughlin, an award-winning journalist, turns her investigative eye on the plasma collection industry, which is astonishingly large but mostly hidden from public view. She has a personal reason for digging into it: She suffers from a rare nerve disease that requires “periodic infusions of a medicine made from human blood plasma.” The author began to wonder where the products originated and about the people who sell their plasma. She had initially expected that the sellers would be a small number of downtrodden people at the bottom of the social ladder. Instead, she found that most sellers come from the middle class. They often have jobs but struggle to make ends meet. They use the money from selling plasma to buy groceries or gas, cover bills, or repay loans. While there is no exact count of the number of sellers, a good guess is that more than 20 million people donate each year, “nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population of people 18 years or older.” As McLaughlin shows, a surprising amount of plasma is exported. In 2021, the value of American blood products sold overseas exceeded $24 billion. The pharmaceutical companies that buy the plasma understand their donor base, and they locate collection clinics in areas hit by economic decline. They often pay repeat donors more. For her research, McLaughlin interviewed scores of donors and found that many felt exhausted and ill after making a donation. The long-term health effects of multiple donations is unknown, although McLaughlin surmises that there must be some damage inflicted. “This book,” she writes, “began as a quest to find the people on whose plasma I depend…. I found a splintered society, divided by economics.” It is a distressing conclusion but an inescapable one.

A disturbing, painful story that smoothly combines the personal and the universal.