Toward a Sociology of Plasma Products

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, plasma has become a medical treatment characterized as “liquid gold” to signal its lifesaving potential. Through a manufacturing process termed fractionation, plasma, collected through blood donation, is turned into Plasma Derived Medical Products (PDMPs). The World Health Organization (WHO) has underlined the importance of PDMPs for global health care, including a number of PDMPs on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. The process of collecting plasma from a donor, manufacturing plasma derived treatments, and distributing those treatments globally requires the coordination of multiple social actors operating in different social, political and economic contexts, but has received little attention in scholarly literature on public policy or the social sciences. This paper will introduce a set of analytic questions and concepts that can direct a sociology of plasma products. We build on the behavioral turn in the policy sciences to identify relevant policy questions emerging from this field and offer the analytic tools necessary to investigate how different social actors in this space make meaning of plasma. To do this, we will draw on key concepts in the sociology of health and illness.