Why don't people get paid for blood?

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Why don't people get paid for blood?

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Cause it's a donation

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Why don't people get paid for blood?

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It’s a common misconception that the Food and Drug Administration bans paying for blood. In fact, it only says blood from paid donors has to be labeled that way. But hospitals won’t use it. In practice, nobody really pays for blood, said Mario Macis, an economist at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School who has studied incentives for blood donation. “Even though it’s legal, it’s still considered not totally moral or ethical to pay cash to blood donors.”

Aside from the ickiness of handing out literal blood money, the FDA worries that paying donors would jeopardize the safety of the blood supply. No one with a blood-borne illness is eligible to donate, but the agency worries that if money were on the line, donors might lie about their health or their risk behaviors.

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Plasma donation — in which blood is drawn, plasma separated out, and then blood cells and other components put back into you — is often compensated. The FDA doesn’t require paid plasma donations to be labeled. The reason is that plasma collected this way never goes straight into another person. It’s broken into many different protein products that will become pharmaceuticals. Along the way, these components are processed to remove or kill any virus stowaways. “The risk of infection is inherently much lower,” said Dr. Christopher Stowell, who recently chaired the FDA’s Blood Products Advisory Committee. Whole red blood cells are too fragile to undergo the same kind of processing as plasma.

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