Impoverished People Selling Their Blood Fuels Pharma Profits (2)

As a kid, Laura Rohe seemed to be continually ill: pneumonia, sinus infections, skin lesions. “I was the sick child” resting on the couch while her siblings played, she recalls. At age 14 she was diagnosed with common variable immunodeficiency. Her body wasn’t making enough infection-fighting antibodies, draining her in daily life and dramatically raising her risk for liver maladies, chronic lung disease and cancer. Then she began monthly immunoglobulin infusions prescribed by her doctors, and “it was like a light switch,” says Rohe, 51, a nurse at an immunology clinic in Omaha, Nebraska, who’s also worked with a pharmaceutical ...