Posted on 05/16/2024 1:28:17 AM PDT by RandFan
On a former slave owner’s cotton plantation in Arkansas, the sprawling Cummins state farm prison covers 6,700 hectares (16,500 acres) and can house nearly 1,900 inmates.
It is a working farm with vegetable crops, a dairy and livestock, but for more than two decades its most lucrative product was the blood plasma harvested from the convicts.
Prisoners were paid between $5 and $7 each time, and the plasma was sold for about $100 into the drug industry supply chain from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.
Cummins was one in a network of prisons across America that provided plasma and its extracts in products shipped around the world, including to Britain. Other paid donors were recruited from deprived neighbourhoods of the US, including drug addicts and people with sexual diseases.
Cara McGoogan, author of The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood, said: “The plasma was so profitable it was called liquid gold. From the prisons in America to the UK, mistakes were made all along the chain that created this deadly product.”
Shocking accounts have been uncovered of the “bleeders” who donated at Cummins. It was claimed there were no sinks in the bleeding area, no clinical scrubs or gloves. The bleeding rooms were dirty with blood on the floor. It is claimed the screening procedures were regularly flouted.
At another prison in Louisiana, there were even more appalling claims. One witness claimed seeing people “shooting intravenous drugs” while waiting to donate, while others allegedly had sex in the bathroom before “going on the table to bleed”.
Clotting agents extracted from the plasma were used to treat people in Britain who suffer from haemophilia, a medical condition in which the ability of the blood to clot is severely reduced.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Make no mistake this was a lucrative enterprise which continued throughout the 1980s despite the government knowing about the risks in '83.
It’s still a big business today. Plasma centers pay money for well... your plasma. A human body regenerates it way more quickly than blood cells. Very long story. Worked years in the blood industry, building machines to process blood. Human and others.
One pint and you begin to smell like boiled cabbage, urine, and farts? That’s just awful.
“it was called”
“Shocking accounts have been uncovered”
“there were even more appalling claims”
“One witness claimed”
There are many “claims” in this article about things that happened 50 years ago. I think someone is trying to sell a book or movie or podcast, or just cause outrage. Did they ever find the bones of the indigenous Canadian children? nope
Well the reparations the US paid to Japan and Canada were real enough. Amazing how most info has ben scrubbed from websites.
Back when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. Lots of people died because of that tainted criminal blood.
Tainted Blood, wasn’t that a song by Soft Cell?
Close. Tainted Love
No Love for Bill though
This scandal is cooking and the report will be out in a few weeks. It should be going into some more details I hope...
plasma centers have been around a very long time, use to pay $30.00 for each donation. dont have any idea how mach is paid today?
people on welfare used to go for extra money, drugies too for a new fix.
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