Chapter 13 - The Blood Trade

Summary

Chapter 13 summarises how the blood trade, and especially the sale of plasma, obtained from ‘donors’ who repeatedly attended specialised ‘plasmapheresis centres’, played a substantial role in the worldwide dissemination of HIV and also in the amplification of HIV shortly after it arrived in Haiti. In Port-au-Prince, a for-profit plasmapheresis centre, owned by a Miami investor and a Haitian minister, attracted several thousand poor men and women who sold their plasma week after week for a few dollars in 1971–2, just a few years after the virus arrived in Haiti. HIV spread extremely quickly in other plasmapheresis centres, especially in China, where quarter of a million people were infected with HIV. Other victims included haemophiliacs from many countries who were contaminated when treated with a coagulation factor concentrate whose preparation required the pooling of plasma from thousands of donors in many countries, procured through ‘plasma brokers’.