The Global Trade in Prisoners' Blood: FDA pulled the company’s license to sell blood “for falsifying records and shipping hot blood.”

Jeffrey St. Clair: Arkansas Bloodsuckers May 31 / June 1, 2008 | The Global Trade in Prisoners' Blood | By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

... fat contract to a Little Rock company called Health Management Associates, or HMA. The company was paid $3 million a year to run medical services for the state’s prison system, which had been blasted in a ruling by the US Supreme Court as an “evil place run by some evil men.”

HMA not only made money from providing medical care to prisoners, but it also started a profitable side venture: blood mining. The company paid prisoners $7 per pint of their blood. HMA then sold the blood on the international plasma market for $50 a pint, splitting the proceeds 50/50 with the Arkansas Department of Corrections. Since Arkansas is one of the few states that does not pay prisoners for their labor, inmates were frequent donors at the so-called “blood clinic.” Hundreds of prisoners sold as much as two pints a week to HMA. The blood was then sold to pharmaceutical companies, such as Bayer and Baxter International; blood banks, such as the Red Cross; and so-called blood fractionizers, who transformed the blood into medicines for hemophiliacs.
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... the FDA pulled the company’s license to sell blood “for falsifying records and shipping hot blood.” The report goes on to say that “the suspension was for collecting and shipping plasma which had been collected from donors with a history of positive tests for [Hepatitis B]...the violations were directly related to using inmate labor in the record and donor reject list.”

Dunn, and the Arkansas Department of Corrections, convinced the FDA that the fault lay with a prison guard who was taking kickbacks from prisoners in order to let them get back into the blood trade. The license was quickly restored and tainted blood once more began to flow. ...