Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry

 
　　當記者凱瑟琳．麥克勞克琳被指派前往中國工作時，患有罕見的自體免疫疾病的她需要輸血，卻不願利用當地充滿負面新聞的血漿供給系統，凱瑟琳決定尋找其他方式──她成為了自己的血液供應商，在數趟從美國前往中國的旅程中，在行李箱內夾帶來自美國的血漿。在她於中國的工作告一段落之後，凱瑟琳卻無法忘懷在這個過程中，她心中滋生的各種懷疑與猜測，直到一名中國學者指出美國國內的血漿供應鏈問題，與她曾親眼目睹發生在中國的失控狀況的相似之處，促使她決心展開調查。
 
　　本書呈現了這趟橫跨十年的調查，凱瑟琳前往美國尋找血漿來源的真相，得知一年有兩千多萬美國民眾賣血換錢──這個來自人體的產品，在美國國內被「產出」並銷售到全球。她也調查製藥公司過往如何將血漿包裝成治百病的靈丹妙藥，並挖掘在我們眼前發生的美國經濟危機，以及在美國南方邊境不斷壯大的血液市場。
 
　　凱瑟琳的發現，也促使她進一步探問她──作為一名需要血液的患者、一名從他人的受苦中獲益的消費者──在這個剝削鏈之中扮演的角色。凱瑟琳對抗疾病的個人經歷，與令人戰慄的資本主義瘋狂景象，交織出這部作品，呈現了當大企業被允許不受限制地利用那些無法反擊的弱勢族群，會發生什麼事。(文/博客來編譯)

A ＂haunting＂ (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even) and deeply personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit.

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable.

So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the ＄20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing an industry that targets America’s most economically vulnerable for immense profit.

Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to utilize that country’s scandal-plagued plasma supply--outbreaks throughout the 1990s and early 2000s struck thousands with blood-borne diseases as impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless abandon. Instead, McLaughlin becomes her own runner, hiding American plasma in her luggage during trips from the United States to China. She finishes the job, but never could get the plasma story out of her head. Suspicions become certainties when a source from the past, a visiting Chinese researcher, warns McLaughlin of troubling echoes between America’s domestic plasma supply chain and the one she’d seen spin out into chaos in China.

Blood Money shares McLaughlin’s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit--a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America’s southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay.

McLaughlin’s findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin’s personal battle to overcome illness as a working American with an electrifying exposé of capitalism run amok in a searing portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those least empowered to fight back.

Kathleen McLaughlin is an award-winning journalist who reports and writes about the consequences of economic inequality around the world. A frequent contributor to TheWashington Post and The Guardian, McLaughlin’s reporting has also appeared in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Economist, NPR, and more. She is a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and has won multiple awards for her reporting on labor in China. Blood Money is her first book.