This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 2nd, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown. In Canada, an outright prohibition on compensating people who donate blood plasma is gaining ground.

Strangely, Canada seems to have fewer problems with importing blood plasma from the United States.

The U.S. of course does pay people for their blood plasma.

Thousands of Canadians depend on this life-saving blood component.

Peter Jaworski is a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown University

specializing in ethics.

We talked about the life and death consequences of paying people for blood plasma this weekend

at the Cato Club 200 event in Middleburg, Virginia. When we talk about trade, we think about how we think about like goods, like machining parts or metals that come into countries and move across them we need them as inputs to

other products.

But one of the elements of trade is actually in bodily fluids, precious bodily fluids that are necessary for a lot of people to live.

So with respect to Canada and the United States,

there is an issue that is legitimately a trade issue

relating to blood plasma.

So explain what that is.

Okay, so let me back up a little and just kind of explain to your listeners how important blood plasma is to the American export market.

Blood plasma exports represent 1.6% of all exports, of all American exports. 1.6% is higher than aluminum. It's higher than the

amount of cars that you export. Now you export it all over the world and in fact the United States makes up about

60% of the total supply of plasma protein products. So you use blood plasma and you manufacture these.

Sometimes they're called plasma derived medicinal products.

Other times they're called plasma therapies,

but you make these from human blood plasma.

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