How Impoverished People Selling Their Blood Fuels Drug Profits

As a kid, Laura Rohe seemed to be continually ill: pneumonia, sinus infections, skin lesions. “I was the sick child” resting on the couch while her siblings played, she recalls. At age 14 she was diagnosed with common variable immunodeficiency. Her body wasn’t making enough infection-fighting antibodies, draining her in daily life and dramatically raising her risk for liver maladies, chronic lung disease and cancer. Then she began monthly immunoglobulin infusions prescribed by her doctors, and “it was like a light switch,” says Rohe, 51, a nurse at an immunology clinic in Omaha, Nebraska, who’s also worked with a pharmaceutical industry lobbying group. “I was just a normal kid after that.”

Rohe’s medicine is made from human blood plasma, the liquid component of blood. It’s one of a group of therapies used to treat millions of people worldwide for conditions such as hemophilia, immune disorders, sepsis and burns. These formulas, containing antibodies and other proteins but no blood cells, are medical miracles, with many included on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. Life expectancy for hemophilia patients was just 19 years in 1955; today it’s nearly the same as for everyone else. The survival rate for patients with Rohe’s condition was only 30% in 1979; now they have an almost-normal life expectancy.