The American Red Cross and Community Blood Bank call me nonstop this time of year. They use different phone numbers and intermittently leave voicemails asking me to call them back. Every time I check my phone and see one of those dreaded numbers, I experience a momentary rush of frustration.
In the end, though, I am lucky to receive these calls. It shows that our system of voluntary blood donation is alive and well. Some countries are not so lucky, and the results are not pretty. Take, for example, the nation of India, where blood farms have sprung into existence to fill the void left by a lack of donors.
Here’s how it works.
The shelf life of whole blood is between three to five weeks. Red blood cells lose their ability to squeeze through tiny blood vessels after three weeks, while platelets are viable for only five days. Although the United States experiences numerous blood shortages in a typical year, it still has one of the highest voluntary donation rates in the world.
"Voluntary" is the operative word. Even though less than ten percent of the eligible United States population donates blood, they do so voluntarily. Many other countries are forced to pay donors. Superstitions and misinformation discourage donation, and hospitals are forced to either find alternatives or watch their patients die.
Sounds like a business opportunity, right?
The city of Gorakhpur in India receives only fifty percent of the blood it needs to treat its patients from voluntary blood drives. The rest comes from professional donors, who are compensated for their labors. These professional donors frequently accept blood from dubious sources to increase the supply and maximize profit.
And in 2008, Gorakpur police discovered seventeen people held captive in dilapidated shacks on a dairy farm, being drained of their blood for profit.
They were tended to by medical professionals. Since voluntary blood banks only accept blood every two to three months, these individuals were bled at least twice a week. Emaciated by long months of captivity, they had grown too weak to escape or to even acknowledge the police that came to free them.
They were tended to by medical professionals, new faces this time. They had to be slowly nursed back to health. They underwent bloodletting so that they did not die from the shock of excessive oxygen. Their skin was malleable like putty, grey and prematurely wrinkled.
On paper, this is sickening. In practice, without this blood, even more patients will die on the operating table. So people look the other way. Local blood dealers peddle pints of B negative and patients’ families buy it, desperate to see their child or spouse survive the day. These people are not thinking about where blood comes from, but where it's going.
So the transaction of human lives goes on. Seventeen people supplied the city with life while barely clinging to their own. A year after the discovery of this particular blood farm, local hospitals' demand for donations had subsided. There were no new blood banks, no increase on voluntary donation.
Blood was coming from somewhere, so doctors treated their patients just as before. Poor and drug-addicted residents of the city continued to fall prey to men who offered them cash for their blood.
Somewhere, away from prying eyes, a padlock clicked shut.
Scott Carney, the investigative journalist whose work inspired this piece, has traveled the world learning about the market for human body parts. You can read more about the reality of the blood trade in his book, The Red Market.
