Asklemmy

43770 readers

1467 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

161

What's your stance on "donating" blood plasma? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 month ago by v4ld1z@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

114 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've had a little of a debate with a commenter recently where they've argued that "donating" (selling, in their words, because you can get money for it) your blood plasma is a scam because it's for-profit and you're being exploited.

Now, I only have my German lense to look at this, but I've been under the impression that donating blood, plasma, thrombocytes, bone marrow, whatever, is a good thing because you can help an individual in need. I get that, in the case of blood plasma, the companies paying people for their donations must make some kind of profit off that, else they wouldn't be able to afford paying around 25€ per donation. But I'm not sure if I'd call that a scam. People are all-around, usually, too selfish and self-centered to do things out of the goodness of their hearts, so offering some form of compensation seems like a good idea to me.

In the past, I've had my local hospital call me asking for a blood donation, for example, because of an upcoming surgery of a hospitalised kid that shares my blood group. I got money for that too.

What are your guys' thoughts on the matter? Should it be on donation-basis only and cut out all incentives - monetary or otherwise? Is it fine to get some form of compensation for the donation?

Very curious to see what you think

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] DrBob@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think the larger issue is that the blood supply is for profit in the US. Everyone is getting exploited, including the people that require the transfusion.

I donate regularly in Canada and give it away for free as does everyone else. I don't donate plasma because it's not especially useful with my blood type (AB+ is universal for plasma, O- for other products).

[–] Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago

I'm just surprised there isn't a shadow industry of selling blood products fed on people altruistically donating for free (like, as far as I can tell, every country with public healthcare does) with corrupt pseudo-legal marketing ensuring that blood products are not sold for profit (because they sell the bag, not the blood, or they sell the service of delivering blood, or some bullshit like that)