> The "donations" in this case aren't really donations. They're being paid in exchange for their blood plasma.
Which gets back to the question - what's wrong with that?
The alternative is not to pay people for donating plasma, and we can see quite clearly that that doesn't work - every country that does not pay for blood plasma donations runs a shortage, and most of them end up importing plasma from the US.
So, we have to pay for plasma, or else we won't have enough, which means people will literally die. Given that we have to pay for plasma, what's wrong with letting anyone who's medically eligible to donate do so?
Most of the common arguments against tissue donation (safety, incentive to lie, etc.) either don't apply to plasma donation or are no longer relevant thanks to the cost and accuracy of modern testing methods. There is no medical or financial reason not to permit the practice, and I'm struggling to see a moral one that doesn't eventually result in people dying because we refuse to collect the life-saving tissue that people are perfectly capable of providing and willing to provide.
People also die due to disease contamination of the blood supply when you pay. Donation only blood supplies are much safer in the short and long term, until we can manufacture a replacement.
Sure, right now we gave good tests for most diseases, but the next AIDS has no test making the long term risks real.
I don't think you read the post you replied to in full. He stipulated that the current testing methodology is good enough to prevent any death from blood purchasing.
None of the current tests are 100% accurate for known diseases. So, no it's really not safe today. Further as I said, the risk for the next outbreak is significant.
PS: Risks of AIDS are conservatively estimated at 1:1.5 million per transfusion, but some people get a lot of transfusions. Here is one example from 2008: https://www.cdc.gov/Mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5941a3.htm AIDS is also rapidly becoming drug resistant making reduced transmission even more important.
This would very well still be a risk if they were all donations and not monetary transactions. The onus is on you to provide evidence to show a corelation between purchased blood and AIDS/HIV.
The CDC did that years ago which is why donations stopped being monetary transactions. The current risks are lower in large part due to testing, but screening questions are still a significant part of the blood safety net and history has shown people lie when money is involved.
They do have the if there is any reason you suspect their might be an issue bar code because people still lie even without money simply because of social pressure.
