The very soul of a nation is threatened as three once naive Americans risk the ultimate sacrifice to uncover and expose a global conspiracy to defraud America of trillions funded by Washington war profiteering and illegal drug sales sanctioned by the CIA, controlled by the Mafia and laundered by Wall Street traders. Blood Profit$ will take you into the cigar smoke-filled room where American policy and laws are really made… ,
During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, thousands of Americans became infected with HIV through the nation's blood supply. Because little reliable information existed at the time AIDS first began showing up in hemophiliacs and in others who had received transfusions, experts disagreed about whether blood and blood products could transmit the disease. During this period of great uncertainty, decision-making regarding the blood supply became increasingly difficult and fraught with risk. This volume provides a balanced inquiry into the blood safety controversy, which involves private sexual practices, personal tragedy for the victims of HIV/AIDS, and public confidence in America's blood services system. The book focuses on critical decisions as information about the danger to the blood supply emerged. The committee draws conclusions about what was doneâ€"and recommends what should be done to produce better outcomes in the face of future threats to blood safety. The committee frames its analysis around four critical area: Product treatmentâ€"Could effective methods for inactivating HIV in blood have been introduced sooner? Donor screening and referralâ€"including a review of screening to exlude high-risk individuals. Regulations and recall of contaminated bloodâ€"analyzing decisions by federal agencies and the private sector. Risk communicationâ€"examining whether infections could have been averted by better communication of the risks.
"Future historians of the horror genre who ignore Nowell's insights into a major transitional period in the relationship between independent producers and the major studios will do so at their own peril." Kevin Heffernan, author of Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968 "Challenging numerous myths along the way, this impeccably researched study sheds new light not only on slasher films and cycles, but on the nature, structure and practices of independent production in North America in the 1970s and 1980s. Highly recommended." Professor Steve Neale, University of Exeten "Meticulously researched and forcefully argued... Offers new insights into how films, filmmaking and film marketing operated in the North American film industry of the 1970s and early 1980s." Peter Kramer, University of East Anglia, UK, author of The New Hollywood (2005) Scholars have consistently applied psychoanalytic models to representations of gender in early teen slasher films in order to claim that these were formulaic. excessively violent exploitation films, fashioned to satisfy the misogynist fantasies of teenage boys and grind house patrons. However, by examining the commercial logic, strategies and objectives of the American and Canadian independents that produced the films and the companies that distributed them in the US. Blood Money demonstrates that filmmakers and marketers actually went to extraordinary lengths to make early teen slashers attractive to female youth, to minimize displays of violence, gore and suffering and to invite comparisons to a wide range of post-classical Hollywood's biggest hits---including Love Story and Saturday Night Fever. Richard Nowell is a film scholar who has lectured at leading universities in the UK and Germany. His work can also be seen in Cinema Journal the Journal of Film and Video, and Post Script.
"Bad Blood meets Dreamland in this kaleidoscopic investigation into the shadowy and vampiric blood business and the dangerous limits of demand for the crucial resource that runs through our very veins. Every year, about twenty million Americans sell blood plasma for cash in a barely regulated market dominated by private industry and off-the-grid trafficking. These commercial efforts prey on an insatiable market for medical and scientific innovation fed from the veins of some of the country's most marginalized communities, such as undocumented immigrants and residents of poverty-stricken Flint, Michigan. We are often told that "blood donations" are used to save lives, but blood plasma, a component of whole blood, has become a precious commercial good. Blood plasma is collected and marketed by private industry, with the United States one of just five nations on the planet that have not yet banned the practice of pay-for-plasma giving. This precious resource is used for everything from expensive and unproven age-reversing treatments to costly and experimental cures for novel diseases like COVID-19. Based on a cross-country investigation into the plasma-giving capitals of the country, in-depth research into the blood industry, and her personal experience as a beneficiary of plasma-derived treatment for a rare condition, Kathleen McLaughlin's Blood Money reveals the underhanded machinations and unbalanced power structures of the blood industry. Taking us from China's blood black market to Silicon Valley's shadowy tech startups, this is an unforgettable inside look at an industry many of us had no idea even existed. Blood Money is an electrifying exposé that demonstrates the shadowy overlap between big medicine and big business and paints a searing portrait of the extent to which American industry feeds on the country's most vulnerable"--
Richard Titmuss (1907-1973) was a pioneer in the field of social administration (now social policy). In this reissued classic, listed by the New York Times as one of the 10 most important books of the year when it was first published in 1970, he compares blood donation in the US and UK, contrasting the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is in the hands of for-profit enterprises, concluding that a system based on altruism is both safer and more economically efficient. Titmuss’s argument about how altruism binds societies together has proved a powerful tool in the analysis of welfare provision. His analysis is even more topical now in an age of ever changing health care policy and at a time when health and welfare systems are under sustained attack from many quarters.
Thanks to recent progress in biotechnology, surrogacy, transplantation of organs and tissues, blood products or stem-cell and gamete banks are now widely used throughout the world. These techniques improve the health and well-being of some human beings using products or functions that come from the body of others. Growth in demand and absence of an appropriate international legal framework have led to the development of a lucrative global trade in which victims are often people living in insecure conditions who have no other ways to survive than to rent or sell part of their body. This growing market, in which parts of the human body are bought and sold with little respect for the human person, displays a kind of dehumanization that looks like a new form of slavery. This book is the result of a collective and multidisciplinary reflection organized by a group of international researchers working in the field of medicine and social sciences. It helps better understand how the emergence of new health industries may contribute to the development of a global medical tourism. It opens new avenues for reflection on technologies that are based on appropriation of parts of the body of others for health purposes, a type of practice that can be metaphorically compared to cannibalism. Are these the fi rst steps towards a proletariat of men- and women-objects considered as a reservoir of products of human origin needed to improve the health or well-being of the better-off? The book raises the issue of the uncontrolled use of medical advances that can sometimes reach the anticipations of dystopian literature and science fiction.
