Paying people for donating parts of their body is obviously a recipe for disaster.
Is it? The alternative is domestic shortages. In fact, while most of the rest of the world doesn’t pay its donors, but it happily accepts blood products derived from US donors (paid or not).
“The US, with 5 percent of the world’s population, supplies more than 70 percent of the entire world’s plasma used for plasma therapies, and over 80 percent of ours. It is able to do this because in the US, donors are paid.”
“The only countries that don’t rely on American plasma donors are countries that also pay donors for plasma, including Germany, Austria, Czechia (the Czech Republic), and Hungary. The commercial plasma sector in these five countries together makes up more than 90 percent of the entire world’s supply of plasma for plasma therapies.”
Many countries have laws preventing offering money for blood donations. Canada, for example, is one. Knowing this, as an American, Canada is where I donate blood to help our Canadian brothers and sisters. I’ll say that this has been more difficult that I expected though. The Canadian Blood Services location in the border town I’m closest to in Ontario stopped taking whole blood donation and only does apheresis, which I’m not interested in. In Quebec, I had some troubles donating at Héma-Québec as the questionnaire required name and address, but only listed Canadian provinces. The helpful worker there put in her own address under my name so I could donate.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Another thing I noticed is that you can’t donate if you are on PREP or PEP. The info screen says that you shouldn’t discontinue those meds to donate - but if you are in the situation where you need food, what’s the choice going to be there?
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
Clip from a documentary about this stuff: youtu.be/HsvdHYd8BMg?t=1539
The 1-2 minutes after this timestamp are enough for me already and it gets so much worse the more you read about this topic.
Often the blood doesnt even go to actual people and instead is used by pharma companies for research, while actual hospitals and blood banks are running out of blood.
needanke@feddit.org 2 days ago
Idk how it works in the us but in Germany you can always anonomously order them to destroy your sample afterwards (you get a little number which is accociated to your sample but not your person). So If you’re reallx desperate you could just lie about that, give the blood/plasma, take the money and have it destroyed afterwards.