Global Headlines Express | An Upset in Iraq's Election, and The Economist on Paying for Blood

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The Agenda Setter

The Economist: Lift the ban on paying for blood — the limited risks are nothing next to the benefits

Two hundred years ago the British obstetrician James Blundell carried out the first successful transfusion of blood from one person to another, and the history of human transfusion began. Today the blood trade is big business on the international market: in 2016 the total value of the world's blood exports was greater than that of aircraft. But most governments ban paying for blood (plasma) donations, and that ban has weighed heavily on the trade.

Transfusion is no longer the bulk of the blood trade, because better medicine has cut the demand for it. Plasma — the pale-yellow fluid that carries blood cells — matters more and more instead. It is used to make factor VIII, the clotting factor that helps hemophiliacs' blood coagulate, and to make vaccines for rabies, tetanus and Rh-negative blood disease. In 2015 humanity used 50 million liters of plasma, enough to fill 20 Olympic swimming pools. The United States, the biggest supplier, could fill 15 pools on its own; plasma makes up 1.6% of the value of American exports.

The article argues that the United States became a plasma exporting power because of its system of paid donation, which lets companies buy plasma from the public. Only a handful of other countries collect it well — Germany and Hungary, for instance. Most of the countries that have banned payment depend on imports.

Opponents of payment give three reasons:

The first is that plasma will become less safe. Money makes donors more likely to hide a medical history or risky behavior, such as past drug use. Between 1980 and 1990 contaminated blood products infected half the world's hemophiliacs with HIV, among them more than 10,000 plasma donors in China. But modern plasma products carry no such risk. They are heat-treated and thoroughly cleaned by soaking in chemicals, and since those measures were adopted not one transfusion has passed on HIV or hepatitis. Doctors are confident that plasma from paid donors is as healthy as plasma from volunteers.

The second is that if people can sell their blood, fewer volunteers will give it away. Yet there is no evidence so far that payment cools people's willingness to donate. Americans, who are paid, give on average as much as Canadians, who are not — which is why more than 30 economists and philosophers in Canada signed a joint letter asking their government to lift its ban.

The third is that payment exploits the local poor. Some people will certainly sell plasma for the money. But take the United States and Europe: American donors may give only twice a week (medical staff return the platelets and blood cells to the donor while drawing the plasma), and Europeans once a week. At that frequency the short-term effect on a person is small; the long-term effect needs more research.

The fact is that countries which do not reward donors end up importing plasma. But American dominance is no good thing either: when the whole world leans on a single exporter, supply becomes fragile the moment it is cut. To protect their people, governments need more sources of plasma, and the first step is to pay for it.

The 24-Hour Newsmaker

An upset in Iraq's election: an anti-American, anti-Iranian Shia cleric leads the preliminary count.

Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission released the preliminary parliamentary results for the country's 18 provinces in three batches between the 13th and the 15th. The most votes went to the Sairoon Alliance, led by the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, followed by the Fatah Alliance, led by former transport minister Hadi al-Ameri, head of the Shia militia known as the Badr Organization. The Victory Alliance of the sitting prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, came only third.

Iraq's parliament has 329 seats. Since it is hard for any single party or alliance to win a majority, whoever leads the count must join with others to form a governing coalition. Sadr's own electoral alliance already contains several parties, Shia, Sunni and secular alike.

Sadr has said he will not become prime minister but will govern together with other parties. On May 16 he wrote on Twitter that the new cabinet would be made up of technocrats and that fighting corruption would come first. Under the sectarian power-sharing arrangement Iraq adopted after the war, the prime minister is a Shia, while a Kurd holds the presidency and a Sunni the speakership.

After the Iraq War of 2003, the United States led the building of the country's postwar political system, while Iran cultivated close ties with several Shia parties. Both countries' influence over Iraq grew sharply.

According to AFP, Ameri has Iran's backing and Abadi has Washington's. Sadr is a Shia cleric with close ties to Iran, where he lived for years, but he opposes foreign interference and so is out of favor in Tehran.

Sadr is anti-American too, and has repeatedly demanded that US troops leave Iraq altogether. The Shia militia he led took part in the resistance to American forces and was caught up in Iraq's worst sectarian killings, in 2006 and 2007.

Before the election Iran said publicly that it would not allow Sadr's camp to govern. Reuters reported that on election day, the 12th, Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, arrived in Baghdad to stump for the Iranian-backed candidates Ameri and former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Sources told Reuters that Soleimani was trying to persuade other Shia camps to form a coalition government together and keep Sadr's camp out of power. Sadr had already said plainly that he would not "compromise" with Iran, and would not govern alongside the Iranian-backed Ameri and Maliki.

A Pentagon spokesman said on the 15th that the United States favors no candidate or party but supports a fair and transparent electoral process. Defense Secretary James Mattis said the United States "supports the decision of the Iraqi people."

The United States now keeps more than 5,000 troops in Iraq. If Sadr's camp forms the government, the fate of those troops may be reopened for discussion.

What Else Happened in the World

US President Donald Trump meets Liu He, President Xi Jinping's special envoy and vice premier of the State Council. Trump met Liu He at the White House at 4 p.m. on May 17. Liu said China is willing to work with the United States, on the basis of equality and mutual benefit, to handle and settle the trade and economic questions both sides care about, and to keep economic and trade cooperation the ballast and the propeller of the relationship. Trump said the two countries should concentrate on trade and investment in energy and manufacturing, widen agricultural trade and market access, and cooperate more on protecting intellectual property, so as to bring both peoples more real benefit.

The CIA gets its first woman director. On April 17 the US Senate approved the CIA nomination by 54 votes to 45, making former deputy director Gina Haspel the first woman to head the agency.

Nepal's two big leftist parties merge to found the Nepal Communist Party. According to China News Service, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) completed their merger in substance on the 17th. The "Nepal Communist Party" is now formally established.

The US birth rate hits a new low. A report from the US National Center for Health Statistics shows 3.85 million babies were born in the country in 2017, the fewest since 1987. The drop from 2016 to 2017 was the largest in eight years. The reason is that American women under 40 are having children later than they used to.

The European Commission plans to take six EU countries to court over dirty air. The Commission said Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Hungary and Romania have all failed to meet EU air quality standards.

Japanese singer Hideki Saijo dies at 63. According to Asahi Shimbun, Saijo, who became a star in the 1970s with the song "Young Man (Y.M.C.A.)," died of acute heart failure at a hospital in Yokohama on the night of the 16th.

Japan's emperor will abdicate next year. The new emperor will take the throne on May 1, 2019, and the new era name will be announced a month before the change. Emperor Akihito, born in 1933, took the throne on January 7, 1989 as Japan's 125th emperor, under the era name Heisei. Crown Prince Naruhito, now 57, will succeed him on May 1, 2019.

Hawaii's volcano keeps erupting; authorities issue a red alert. On May 16 local time, ash from the Kilauea volcano rose to 12,000 feet. Hawaiian authorities had already issued a red alert telling residents and aircraft to stay away from parts of the Big Island. It was the first red alert from the US Geological Survey, meaning a major eruption is under way or about to begin and that ash could disrupt air traffic in the area.

Someone Said

"What Sanders is doing is what we are going to do this November."

So said US Democratic Congressman Raúl Grijalva. Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 presidential election. But in another sense he changed American politics, and the Democratic Party most of all.

Some of the causes he raised — universal health care, legal marijuana, free college — now win wider agreement. He also campaigns hard for liberal candidates, and Our Revolution, the group he founded, backs hundreds of them more and more often.

Some Democrats who owe Sanders nothing directly have absorbed his political strategy all the same: mobilize the left better rather than court the right.

Whether or not you accept that Sanders is a left-wing populist, one fact is beyond dispute. Just as he pushed Clinton in the 2016 race, he has pulled the whole Democratic Party further left, and more liberal.

"He will find it hard to escape a spell in prison."

So the Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim warned former prime minister Najib Razak.

After 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad won Malaysia's general election, Anwar, a heavyweight of the country's politics, was granted a "full pardon" on Wednesday. He had been sent to prison in 2015, and his supporters accused Najib, then prime minister, of political persecution.

Now the tables have turned. Anwar has announced that he will return to parliament within months. Mahathir has promised to hand power to him in two years. He has every reason to put Najib in the dock: the much-criticized former prime minister was already caught in a corruption scandal in 2015, when 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) was found to have moved US$700 million into his bank accounts. Many think it a surprise that Najib lasted this long at all.

Something Else You Might Be Interested In

A carbon-rich asteroid is found for the first time at the edge of the solar system.

The European Southern Observatory announced recently that an international research team, using its telescope in Chile, found a carbon-rich asteroid beyond Neptune, about 4 billion kilometers from Earth. The body, named 2004 EW95, is about 300 kilometers across and sits at the edge of the solar system, in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune's orbit. It may offer evidence about how the solar system formed.

The solar system as we know it divides roughly into three zones, from the inside out: the rocky terrestrial planets, the gas giants and the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is thought to hold a great many frozen bodies and fragments, which may still carry information from the solar system's formation 4.6 billion years ago.

Tom Seccull of Queen's University Belfast, who led the study, points out that this body's reflected spectrum differs from that of other objects in the Kuiper Belt. It is not only rich in carbon but also contains iron oxides and layered silicates. Astronomers had never found either mineral in the Kuiper Belt before. The researchers reckon it is not a Kuiper Belt "native": it formed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and was later "expelled" to the outer edge of the solar system, billions of kilometers away.

Scientists had already argued that in the early solar system the four gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — kept moving, flinging small rocky bodies from the inner solar system into distant orbits. Finding a carbonaceous asteroid in the Kuiper Belt is strong support for that theory. The results have been published in the American journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

On This Day

May 18, 1897: the British logician Bertrand Russell was born.

May 18, 1953: Jacqueline Cochran became the first woman to fly faster than sound.

May 18, 1970: the National Guard fired on Kent State University students at an anti-Vietnam War rally, killing two male and two female students.

May 18, 1980: the Gwangju Uprising broke out in South Korea, and the Chun Doo-hwan government put down the citizens' democracy movement by force. Official reports counted 207 dead, 122 seriously injured and 730 slightly injured; other figures put the injured at 2,392 and the missing at 987.

May 18, 1977: the International Council of Museums proclaimed the first International Museum Day.

On This Day — Tomorrow and the Day After

May 19, 1919: the Turkish War of Independence began.

May 19, 1957: Peking University's "May 19" socialist democracy movement took place in Beijing, China.

May 19, 1971: the Soviet unmanned probe Mars 2 landed on the surface of Mars, the first probe from Earth to reach it.

May 19, 1986: the Taiwanese dissident Cheng Nan-jung and others launched the "519 Green Action," demanding that the Kuomintang government end martial law.

May 20, 1902: Cuba became independent from the United States.

May 20, 1948: Chiang Kai-shek was sworn in at Nanjing as the first president of the Republic of China under its new constitution.

May 20, 1949: the Taiwan Provincial Martial Law Order, issued by the Republic of China's Taiwan Provincial Government, took effect. The martial law that followed lasted 38 years.

May 20, 1997: Happy Together, directed by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, won best director at the 50th Cannes Film Festival.

Cover image from OneBlood