from Hacker News

So Much Blood

by debesyla on 5/7/25, 9:41 AM with 209 comments

• by blakesterz on 5/7/25, 1:50 PM

  It's worth a read, even if it's not obvious what it's about from that title.

    "To get the actual data, you need to go through a website maintained by the US Trade Commission. This website has good and bad aspects. On the one hand, it’s slow and clunky and confusing and often randomly fails to deliver any results. On the other hand, when you re-submit, it clears your query and then blocks you for submitting too many requests, which is nice."

• by mehulashah on 5/7/25, 3:51 PM

  First — 0.69% of total exports is blood still is surprisingly high! Remember, you can get blood from humans in your own country, and prepare it there. So, why do you need it from the US?

  Second — it’s amazing the detail that you can achieve from public data.

  Third — I’m left wondering if a true “Deep Research” like tool would be able to provide the same analysis. I find that Deep Research is fine for secondary sources, but not for Deep Analysis of primary source data.

• by boesboes on 5/7/25, 2:08 PM

  Funny, because it is illegal to pay donors here. I used to be a donor, but the energy and effort it takes were too much for me at the time. And plasma donors have to 'free up' a lot more time.

  Not to mention how i get a cookie and the semi-goverment organisation charges >600€ for a baggie to hospitals. Someone needs to pay for that CEO's third house and car collection!

• by ParacelsusOfEgg on 5/7/25, 3:25 PM

  I think there might be some confusion by commenters in this thread about selling blood in the US.

  Blood can be separated out into its plasma, red blood cells, and platelets by an apheresis machine. The machine cycles the unused components back into the donar so only one component is donated.

  Blood plasma (~55% by volume), the amber colored water and disolved proteins, can be sold. Red blood cells (~44% by volume), and platelets (~1% by volume) can NOT be sold in the US by donars.

  Most blood drives that you'd experience at school or in the workplace takes whole blood (so there is no need for the apheresis machine) which is more exhausting than if just one of the components was taken.

  Source: an O+ blood donar with 50+ pints donated.

• by ilikecakeandpie on 5/7/25, 2:53 PM

  Behind the Bastards recently did a two part podcast on the blood industry in America, particularly how lack of regulation and taking advantage of the incarcerated (focused on Arkansas) led to the spread of blood borne illnesses and how it killed a lot of people. I had no idea blood was such big business and that it was in our top 10 domestic exports

  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-how-tainted-h...

• by weinzierl on 5/7/25, 2:32 PM

  0.5% of all goods is still a lot and much more than most people would have expected.

  Also interesting: "In 2023, total US goods exports were $2,045 billion, almost exactly ⅔ of all exports, including services."

• by declan_roberts on 5/7/25, 2:14 PM

  Do we really have 38% of Europe's BLOOD as a bargaining chip in trade agreements? This does not bode well for them.

• by fmsf on 5/7/25, 2:48 PM

  Fascinating article, fun that even blood has tariffs https://www.searchtariff.com/?q=blood

  I wonder when we are going to start seeing proper effects of all these tariffs in the market.

  Disclaimer: I am the founder of DataLinks which in turn powers the searchtariff website

• by andai on 5/7/25, 6:30 PM

  The article links to this, which I also enjoyed.

  "Please show lots of digits"

  https://dynomight.net/digits/

• by aezell on 5/7/25, 2:43 PM

  Bummed there wasn't one vampire joke or pun or allusion in this entire article.

• by makmanalp on 5/8/25, 12:16 AM

  This is my time to shine - I know the cause of this mistake. Like the article mentions, international trade is specified using the HS (Harmonized System) encoding mechanism.

  Now, product groups for which data is most frequently and easily available is the 4-digit level, which is quite broad. If you look at the code 3002 in the HS classification system (of which there are many versions but we'll ignore that for now), you'll find a category, succinctly named:

  > "Human blood; animal blood prepared for therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic uses; antisera, other blood fractions and immunological products, whether or not modified or obtained by means of biotechnological processes; vaccines, toxins, cultures of micro-organisms (excluding yeasts) and similar products; cell cultures, whether or not modified:"

  https://hts.usitc.gov/search?query=3002

  People new to trade data, especially programmers, with some hubris, tend to think this is way too long a category name to fit in a title or dropbox, so they chop it at the semicolon and call it good, resulting in "Human Blood" or similar. Better data sources tend to shorten these based on the real world percentage of the subcategories, e.g. see here "Serums and vaccines":

  https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...

  If you search for 3002 (Serums and Vaccines) in the US's exports in 2023 you'll see the figure 1.58%:

  https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...

  Which seems to me to be how they arrived at that incorrect number - some other website showing comtrade / us trade data with bad category names.

  Lesson here: classification systems are hard.

• by hlovdal on 5/7/25, 2:36 PM

  The podcast https://behindthebastards.com/ had two episodes about the surprisingly large export of blood (products) from USA. Spoiler alert, it is mainly rooted in exploitation of the insanely large prison population:

  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

• by morninglight on 5/7/25, 4:21 PM

  Market trends show this as a growing industry in the 2025 economy.

  https://www.cslplasma.com/be-rewarded

• by aeternum on 5/7/25, 5:15 PM

  Excellent writeup. Is there any aggregator that focuses on "let's look at the actual data" articles like this?

• by AlfredBarnes on 5/7/25, 2:18 PM

  A nice write up! Thanks for making it.

  I used to donate ever opportunity I could. I only stopped for medical reasons. I know there are a lot of companies that sell the blood, but it's still needed and can save a life.

• by ch33zer on 5/7/25, 8:56 PM

  Does anyone know of, when I give blood to the red cross or other charities can it end up getting sold for a profit, overseas or otherwise?

• by femiagbabiaka on 5/7/25, 4:01 PM

  Plasma from teachers who don't get paid enough to cover the bills shipped to Europe. There's a great sci-fi novel in there.

• by caycep on 5/7/25, 5:26 PM

  Also - it might be worth looking in donations from Mex/canada. The anecdotal tidbit is that during Trump I with the border shenanigans and COVID, the drop in Mexican nationals crossing the border to donate blood/plasma (paid opportunities apparently), led to a nationwide shortage of derived products like IV IG infusions, etc. At least according to some of the Pharma reps that passed thru the office

• by traktorn on 5/8/25, 5:12 AM

  I love Dynomights writing. I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter.

• by thimkerbell on 5/7/25, 11:48 PM

  I don't understand why an otherwise reputable forum (HN) would be so tolerant of meaning-uninferrable clickbait link titles. Sentience, posters, sentience.

• by 11235813213455 on 5/7/25, 5:15 PM

  I donate a lot to mosquitoes

• by dezzadk on 5/10/25, 12:46 AM

  Gosh, "Hacker News" has become such an abstract garbage can for farfetched longwinded bs articles..

  Today I'll unsubscribe, I won't miss your preference for normie filler content..