My career as an international blood smuggler
(The Guardian China)

For years, Kathleen McLaughlin smuggled American plasma every time she entered China, home to the world´s largest and deadliest blood debacle. She had no other choice I started my decade-long turn as an international blood smuggler in 2004 with a mundane task: packing. I gently stacked a dozen half-liter glass vials into two soft-sided picnic coolers. The bottles held the components of a syrupy mix, a powerful medicine made from the immune system particles collected from thousands of people. A nurse would infuse the syrup into my veins, a treatment to keep my immune system under control, to halt its potentially paralyzing attacks on my nerves.First, I had to get all of this, plus my own needles, to China. Continue reading...