by Rose George
8. Tim Jonze, “‘It Was a Life-and-Death Situation. Wards Were Full of Young Men Dying’: How We Made the Don’t Die of Ignorance AIDS Campaign,” Guardian, September 4, 2017.
9. Some states and countries have HIV-specific legislation. In Texas, people have been arrested for spitting and prosecuted under an aggravated assault statute. In 2008, a homeless man named Willie Campbell was jailed for thirty-five years for spitting in the mouth and eye of a police officer. “HIV-positive Man Sentenced to 35 Years for Spitting at Officer,” Associated Press, May 15, 2008.
10. Interview with Eric Goemaere.
11. “AIDS by the Numbers—AIDS Is Not Over, But It Can Be,” UNAIDS (Geneva: United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, 2016), p. 3.
12. Global Database on HIV-Specific Travel and Residence Restrictions, www.hivtravel.org (accessed May 2018).
13. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Final Rule Removing HIV Infection from U.S. Immigration Screening,”www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/laws-regs/hiv-ban-removal/final-rule.html (accessed May 2018). Other diseases that will deny you entry to the USA: syphilis, infectious leprosy, gonorrhea, and active tuberculosis.
14. “AIDS by the Numbers,” 7.
15. “The Scales Have Tipped: UNAIDS Announces 19.5 Million People on Life-Saving Treatment and AIDS-Related Deaths Halved Since 2005,” UNAIDS, press release, July 20, 2017.
16. Avert, “HIV and AIDS in South Africa,” www.avert.org/professionals/hiv-around-world/sub-saharan-africa/south-africa (accessed March 23, 2018).
17. UNAIDS country profile of South Africa, www.unaids.org/en/regionscountries/countries/southafrica (accessed March 23, 2018).
18. Maxmen, “Older Men and Young Women Drive South African HIV Epidemic.”
19. “Violence Against Women and HIV,” UK Consortium on AIDS and International Development, Fact Sheet, July 2013.
20. Interview with Dr. Sam Wilson.
21. Marta Darder, Liz McGregor, Carol Devine, et al., No Valley Without Shadows: MSF and the Fight for Affordable ARVs in South Africa (Brussels: Médecins Sans Frontières, 2014), 17.
22. Ibid., 18.
23. Interview with Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, former deputy minister of health.
24. Rose George, “A 19th-Century Epidemic,” Mosaic Science, July 6, 2015, https://mosaicscience.com/story/19th-century-epidemic/ (accessed May 2018). S. J. Connolly, “The ‘Blessed Turf’: Cholera and Popular Panic in Ireland, June 1832,” Irish Historical Studies 23, no. 91 (1983): 214–32.
25. John Donnelly, “Activists Wonder if Life Imitates Television in U.S. Policy on AIDS,” Boston Globe, June 18, 2001.
26. In their meta-analysis, researchers found that 55 percent of Americans and 77 percent of sub-Saharan Africans adhered properly to their treatment regime. E. J. Mills, J. B. Nachega, I. Buchanan, et al., “Adherence to Antiretroviral Therapy in Sub-Saharan Africa and North America: A Meta-analysis,” JAMA 296, no. 6 (2006): 679–90.
27. Treatment Action Campaign, Fighting for Our Lives: The History of the Treatment Action Campaign 1998–2010 (Cape Town, South Africa: Treatment Action Campaign, 2010).
28. “Hidden in the Mealie Meal,” Human Rights Watch 19, no. 18(A) (2007): 26.
29. In 2016, more than two-thirds of people living with HIV knew their HIV status. Of the people who knew their status, 77 percent were accessing treatment, and of the people accessing treatment, 82 percent were virally suppressed. However, the 90-90-90 targets are off track in the Middle East, eastern Europe, and central Asia, where AIDS deaths have risen by 48 percent and 38 percent. Ending AIDS: Progress Towards the 90-90-90 Targets, UNAIDS, July 10, 2017.
30. Interview with Eric Goemaere.
31. Jon Cohen, “Large Study Spotlights Limits of HIV Treatment as Prevention,” Science, July 25, 2016.
32. She was known as the Mississippi Baby, and for two years no virus could be detected in her body. Sarah Boseley, “Kick and Kill: Is This the Best New Hope for an AIDS Cure?” Guardian, July 15, 2014; “‘Mississippi Baby’ Now Has Detectable HIV, Researchers Find,” US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, press release, July 10, 2014.
33. StopAIDS, “It Ain’t Over,” https://stopaids.org.uk/our-work/why-hiv-matters/it-aint-over/ (accessed March 23, 2017).
34. Teresa Welsh, “World at Risk of Losing Control of HIV and AIDS Epidemic, PEPFAR Architect Says,” Devex, April 25, 2018.
35. Sarah Boseley, “Think the AIDS Epidemic Is Over? Far from It—It Could Be Getting Worse,” Guardian, July 31, 2016.
36. Edward C. Green, Daniel T. Halperin, Vinand Nantulya, and Janice A. Hogle, “Uganda’s HIV Prevention Success: the Role of Sexual Behavior Change and the National Response,” AIDS and Behavior 10, no. 4 (2006): 335–46.
FIVE: THE YELLOW STUFF
1. NHS, “Why Give Blood?,” www.blood.co.uk/why-give-blood/how-blood-is-used/blood-components/plasma/ (accessed April 3, 2018).
2. NHS Blood and Transplant Price list 2017/18, hospital.blood.co.uk/media/29056/price_list_bc_nhs_2017-18.pdf (accessed March 23, 2018).
3. IVIG costs 39 euros a gram, according to Gwendal Le Masson, Guilhem Solé, Claude Desnuelle, et al., “Home Versus Hospital Immunoglobulin Treatment for Autoimmune Neuropathies: A Cost Minimization Analysis,” Brain and Behavior 8, no. 2 (2018): e00923. The Immunoglobulin Database Report 2015/2016 produced by Medical Data Solutions and Services found an average cost in the UK of £35 ($50) a gram, igd.mdsas.com/wp-content/uploads/ImmunoglobulinDatabaseReport201516.pdf (accessed April 3, 2018). Current gold spot price per gram: $42.20, per Money Metals Exchange, www.moneymetals.com/precious-metals-charts/gold-price (accessed May 2018).
4. These facts and countless others have been built into visualizations from data from the BACI International Trade Database, at the Observatory for Economic Complexity run out of MIT. Prepare to lose many hours there. https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/usa/all/show/2016/ (accessed March 23, 2018).
5. Jim MacPherson is not the only person to use the phrase. Andrew Pollack, “Is Money Tainting the Plasma Supply?,” New York Times, December 5, 2009.
6. Creativ-Ceutical/EAHC-EU Commission-EU, An EU-wide Overview of the Market of Blood, Blood Components and Plasma Derivatives Focusing on Their Availability for Patients/Creativ-Ceutical Report, April 8, 2015.
7. National Hemophilia Foundation, Fast Facts, www.hemophilia.org/About-Us/Fast-Facts (accessed March 23, 2018).
8. World Federation of Hemophilia, “What Is Hemophilia?,” www.wfh.org/en/page.aspx?pid=646 (accessed June 8, 2018).
9. World Federation of Hemophilia, “Severity of Hemophilia,” www.wfh.org/en/page.aspx?pid=643 (accessed April 3, 2018).
10. The 4,689 figure comes from the UK Haemophilia Centres Doctors’ Organisation. The number of survivors was revealed in a parliamentary written question on January 29, 2018, and added to a figure of 220 deaths from Scotland. Simon Hattenstone, “Britain’s Contaminated Blood Scandal: ‘I Need Them to Admit They Killed My Son,’” Guardian, March 3, 2018; “UKHCDO Bleeding Disorder Statistics for April 2010 to March 2011,” p. 41, www.ukhcdo.org/docs/AnnualReports/2011/UKHCDO%20Bleeding%20Disorder%20Statistics%20for%202010-2011.pdf (accessed June 8, 2018).
11. The All-Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Haemophilia and Contaminated Blood, “Inquiry into the Current Support of Those Affected by the Contaminated Blood Scandal in the UK,” January 2015, 9.
12.The Penrose Inquiry, Final Report, vol. 1: Patients’ Experiences, March 2015, p. 28.
13. Panorama, “Contaminated Blood: The Search for the Truth,” broadcast July 17, 2017.
14. Final Report/Commissi
oner: Horace Krever, Government of Canada, Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada, 3 vols. (Ottawa, Ontario: Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada, 1997), vol. 2, p. 370.
15. Julian Miller interviewed on Good Health, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvOHWRxuBYM.
16. Starr, Blood, 240.
17. FDA, CPG Sec. 230.150, “Blood Donor Classification Statement, Paid or Volunteer Donor,” https://www.fda.gov/ucm/groups/fdagov-public/@fdagov-afda-ice/documents/webcontent/ucm122798.pdf (accessed June 2018).
18. Allen M. Hornblum, “They Were Cheap and They Were Available: Prisoners as Research Subjects in Early Twentieth Century America,” BMJ 315, no. 7120 (1997): 1437.
19. By 1945, 71,350 felons had given 100,000 pints of blood. Lederer, Flesh and Blood, 93.
20. Ibid.
21. Mara Leveritt, “Bloody Awful: How Money and Politics Contaminated Arkansas’s Prison Plasma Program,” Arkansas Times, August 16, 2007.
22. Jeffrey St. Clair, “Arkansas Bloodsuckers: The Clintons, Prisoners and the Blood Trade,” Counterpunch, September 4, 2015. Also James Ridgeway, It’s All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 184.
23. J. Garrott Allen, letter to W. D’A. Maycock, January 6, 1975, downloaded from www.taintedblood.info. This and many other documents were released to the Tainted Blood campaign after a Freedom of Information request but are currently unavailable due to an impending public inquiry and a lawsuit.
24. World in Action, “Blood Money,” transcript, Penrose Inquiry, Final Report, March 2015, www.penroseinquiry.org.uk/downloads/transcripts/PEN0131400.pdf (accessed January 18, 2018).
25. Week In, Week Out, originally broadcast on BBC Wales on January 26, 1988, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir0qLl3n94o (accessed April 4, 2018).
26. Rupert Harry Miller, Life of a Salesman: A True Story (self-pub., Kindle, 2014), p. 35, loc. 462.
27. Press release, Coalition Against Bayer Dangers (Germany), January 24, 2010.
28. H. Krever, Final Report: Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada (Ottawa: The Commission, 1997), vol. 3, p. 758.
29. Ibid., 760.
30. Editorial, Lancet 324, nos. 8417–8418 (December 29, 1984): 1433.
31. Walt Bogdanich and Eric Koli, “2 Paths of Bayer Drug in 80’s: Riskier One Steered Overseas,” New York Times, May 22, 2003.
32. Ibid.
33. Carol Anne Grayson, “Blood Flows Not Just Through Our Veins but Through Our Minds. How Has the Global Politics of Blood Impacted on the UK Haemophilia Community?” master’s diss., University of Sunderland, 2007, http://haemophilia.org.uk/support/day-day-living/patient-support/contaminated-blood/dissertation-carol-grayson-contaminated-blood-products/ (accessed May 2018).
34. Marianne Barriaux, “Iraqi Father Who Lost Five Sons to AIDS Still Struggling for Justice,” Middle East Eye/AFP, December 18, 2014.
35. Letter from Arthur Bloom to all hemophilia center directors, January 11, 1982.
36. Simon Hattenstone, “Britain’s Contaminated Blood Scandal,” Guardian, March 3, 2018. Jan and Colin Smith were also interviewed for BBC’s Panorama, “Contaminated Blood: The Search for the Truth,” first broadcast July 13, 2017.
37. Armour did not modify its process until two years later. Krever, Final Report: Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada, vol. 2, p. 506.
38. Department of Health and Social Security Finance Department circular, March 5, 1985.
39. Geoff Leo, “HIV Rates on Sask. Reserves Higher Than Some African Nations,” CBC, June 3, 2015.
40. Mark Lemstra and Cory Neudorf, “Health Disparity in Saskatoon: Analysis to Intervention,” Saskatoon Health Region, 2008.
41. Canadian Hemophilia Society, “Commemoration of the Tainted Blood Tragedy,” www.hemophilia.ca/en/commemoration-of-the-tainted-blood-tragedy/ (accessed April 2018).
42. Health Canada, “Plasma Donation in Canada,” www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-health-products/biologics-radiopharmaceuticals-genetic-therapies/activities/fact-sheets/plasma-donation-canada.html (accessed April 2018).
43. Angela Kocherga, “Plasma Is Big Business Along the Border,” ABC7 KVIA, February 27, 2012, www.kvia.com/news/plasma-is-big-business-along-the-border/53247859 (accessed April 2018).
44. Robert C. James and Cameron A. Mustard, “Geographic Location of Commercial Plasma Donation Clinics in the United States, 1980–1995,” American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 7 (2004): 1224–29.
45. Analidis Ochoa-Bendaña, The Big Business of Blood Plasma, twodollarsaday.com, blog, June 16, 2016, www.twodollarsaday.com/blog/2016/6/16/the-big-business-of-blood-plasma (accessed April 2018).
46. Ibid.
47. The FDA allows Americans to sell plasma up to twice a week. “The volume of plasma collected during an automated plasmapheresis collection procedure shall be consistent with the volumes specifically approved by the Director, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and collection shall not occur less than 2 days apart or more frequently than twice in a 7-day period.” US Food and Drug Administration, Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, vol. 7, pt. 640: Additional Standards for Human Blood and Blood Products, Sec. 640.65, www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?CFRPart=640&showFR=1&subpartNode=21:7.0.1.1.7.7 (accessed May 2018).
48. Derek Norfolk, ed., Handbook of Transfusion Medicine, 5th edition (London: TSO, 2013), 16.
49. Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), 93.
50. Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, “The Twisted Business of Donating Plasma,” Atlantic, May 28, 2014. Wellington concluded that the poor health effects of donating plasma are linked to the sodium citrate used to preserve blood products.
51. R. Laub, S. Baurin, D. Timmerman, et al., “Specific Protein Content of Pools of Plasma for Fractionation from Different Sources: Impact of Frequency of Donations,” Vox Sanguinis 99, no. 3 (2010): 220–31.
52. Legislative Assembly of Ontario, Standing Committee on Social Policy, Bill 21, Safeguarding Health Care Integrity Act, 2014, Hearing, Monday December 1, 2014, http://www.ontla.on.ca/web/committee-proceedings/committee_transcripts_details.do?locale=en&Date=2014-12-01&ParlCommID=9003&BillID=3015&Business=&DocumentID=28419 (accessed May 2018).
53. Ibid.
54. Lucy Reynolds, “Selling Our Safety to the Highest Bidder: The Privatisation of Plasma Resources UK,” openDemocracy UK, April 24, 2013, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/lucy-reynolds/selling-our-safety-to-highest-bidder-privatisation-of-plasma-resources-uk.
55. Suzanne Shelley, “Immunoglobulin (IG) Drives the Blood-Plasma Therapeutics Market,” Pharmaceutical Commerce, April 4, 2016.
56. Although early results were promising, the third stage of the Baxter trial showed that “IVIg infusions performed every 2 weeks do not improve cognition or function at 18 months in patients with mild to moderate AD.” Norman R. Relkin, Ronald G. Thomas, Robert I. Rissman, et al., “A Phase 3 Trial of IV Immunoglobulin for Alzheimer Disease,” Neurology 88, no. 18 (2017): 1768–75; Madolyn Bowman Rogers, “Bon Appétit: Endogenous Antibodies Prod Microglia to Eat Aβ Deposits,” Alzforum, February 25, 2016, www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/bon-appetit-endogenous-antibodies-prod-microglia-eat-av-deposits (accessed April 6, 2018).
57. S. Kile, W. Au, C. Parise, et al., “IVIG Treatment of Mild Cognitive Impairment Due to Alzheimer’s Disease: A Randomised Double-Blinded Exploratory Study of the Effect on Brain Atrophy, Cognition and Conversion to Dementia,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 88, no. 2 (2017): 106–11.
58. Anne Kingston, “What a Blood Plasma
-for-Profit Clinic Means for Public Health Care,” Macleans, January 14, 2017.
59. Sophia Chase, “The Bloody Truth: Examining America’s Blood Industry and Its Tort Liability Through the Arkansas Prison Plasma Scandal,” William & Mary Business Law Review 3, no. 2 (2012): 597.
60. European Blood Alliance, Blood, Tissues and Cells from Human Origin: The European Blood Alliance Perspective (Amsterdam: European Blood Alliance, 2013), 74.
61. CBC Radio, “The Debate over Paying Canadians for Plasma,” February 25, 2018.
62. “Department of Health Secures Guaranteed Long-Term Supplies of Plasma for NHS Patients,” Department of Health, press release, December 17, 2002.
63. It was sold to Bain for £230 million ($329 million), with the UK government retaining 20 percent. Four years later, Bain and the UK government sold BPL (UK and US branches both) to Creat for “a total cash consideration” of £820 million ($1.17 billion). Paul Gallagher, “‘Is There No Limit to What This Government Will Privatise?’: UK Plasma Supplier Sold to US Private Equity Firm Bain Capital,” Independent (London), June 11, 2014; “Creat Group Corporation Agrees to Acquire Bio Products Laboratory Ltd.,” BainCapital.com, press release, May 18, 2016.