Kathleen McLaughlin’s new book, “Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America’s Blood Industry,” begins in China with the kind of intrigue tailor made for a political thriller. It’s 2004, and we learn that the author, a journalist from Butte, is smuggling medicine made from human blood out of the U.S. into China in vials carefully hidden in her suitcase. She is living and working in China, and needs the banned plasma products to treat her autoimmune disease. McLaughlin’s personal narrative serves as a compelling entry into a deeply reported story about the history and current state of the human blood trade, in which people sell their plasma for cash.
