Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry (First One Signal Publishers/Atria Books hardcover )

"Bad Blood meets Dreamland in this kaleidoscopic investigation into the shadowy and vampiric blood business and the dangerous limits of demand for the crucial resource that runs through our very veins.

Every year, about twenty million Americans sell blood plasma for cash in a barely regulated market dominated by private industry and off-the-grid trafficking.

These commercial efforts prey on an insatiable market for medical and scientific innovation fed from the veins of some of the country's most marginalized communities, such as undocumented immigrants and residents of poverty-stricken Flint, Michigan.

We are often told that "blood donations" are used to save lives, but blood plasma, a component of whole blood, has become a precious commercial good.

Blood plasma is collected and marketed by private industry, with the United States one of just five nations on the planet that have not yet banned the practice of pay-for-plasma giving.

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