With rising rent, utilities and the cost of groceries, a growing number of people are selling their blood plasma to make extra money. It's a multi-billion dollar industry.
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The rising cost of living has prompted many people to sell their blood plasma to earn extra money. This is the yellow fluid pumped through our veins. It's needed to produce many lifesaving medicines. David Martin Davies from Texas Public Radio looks at some of the difficult questions raised when people who are often desperate for cash sell their plasma.
DAVID MARTIN DAVIES, BYLINE: Last October, there was a crude but whimsical painting of an enthusiastic Dracula on a window at the Grifols plasma center in downtown San Antonio. It was a Halloween decoration, but you have to wonder if having a vampire leering at blood plasma donors was in good taste. Spain-based Grifols is one of the world's largest producers of plasma-derived medicines. And in 2024, it reported a revenue of about $8 billion. That was due in part to people like Octavia Rodrigues, who comes here for a specific reason.
OCTAVIA RODRIGUES: Oh, for extra cash.
DAVIES: She says she donates twice a week, and she even takes iron supplements to help deal with the effects.
RODRIGUES: I could barely stand when I got home.
DAVIES: And Rodrigues says she's selling plasma to get by.
RODRIGUES: Hopefully, if I get the second job, I'll quit this, don't have to really come back here anymore.
DAVIES: Most plasma donors in the U.S. come from lower-income households. According to the study from the University of Michigan, the interlinkage between blood plasma donation and poverty in the United States, paid plasma donation has become a common economic coping strategy among Americans dealing with the high rates of poverty and steep increases in the cost of essential expenses.
KATHLEEN MCLAUGHLIN: We have this industry that's based around getting people to sell their plasma twice a week every week in perpetuity as long as they can.
DAVIES: Kathleen McLaughlin, author of the book "Blood Money: The Story Of Life, Death, And Profit Inside America's Blood Industry," says the multibillion dollar plasma industry depends on American poverty.
MCLAUGHLIN: It made me understand how many millions of Americans are just on the fringes economically, and this is something they need to do to get by.
DAVIES: But a new study shows the extra income that plasma donors get allows them to avoid predatory debt traps.
EMILY GALLAGHER: What we found was when a plasma center opens in a neighborhood, the young adults there become 18% less likely to open a new payday loan.
DAVIES: Emily Gallagher is a professor of finance at the University of Colorado Boulder and the coauthor of the study "Blood Money: Selling Plasma To Avoid High-Interest Loans." Gallagher says the money paid out by a plasma center is equivalent to what FEMA would inject into a local area after a major natural disaster, and this is happening year after year.
GALLAGHER: In 2021, the average plasma center paid up to 6 million in donor compensation.
DAVIES: Furthermore, another recent study, "Financial Incentives And Public Safety: The Role Of Blood Plasma Donation Centers In Crime Reduction," found that the opening of a plasma center in a city leads to an approximate 12% drop in the overall crime rate, primarily by reducing property and drug-related offenses. The crime reduction effect is thought to be the results of both the legal income provided to donors and drug screening requirements at the centers.
Gallagher said these findings present difficult ethical questions about allowing the paid plasma market to exist in the United States. Some people object to the idea that poor people are being exploited, but on the other hand, these people are also being given an opportunity to make extra money without taking on high-interest short-term loans or breaking the law.
For NPR News, I'm David Martin Davies in San Antonio.
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