Blood donors surprised Canadian plasma products being sold abroad – CBC
Spanish drugmaker Grifols using donated plasma byproducts to manufacture albumin
Sep 11, 2025
Peter Johnson walks into his Canadian Blood Services donation centre in Saint John every week to give plasma.
As a child, Johnson suffered from idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, which leads to bruising and bleeding. He was treated with steroids, but today, one of the treatments is intravenous immunoglobulin, made from plasma.
That’s why he has been giving plasma ever since he was old enough to donate.
The two-hour process pulls whole blood from Johnson’s arm, separating out the yellow plasma and returning the rest back into his body. He knows the value of his donations.
What he didn’t know was that Canadian Blood Services sells Canadian blood donation byproducts to the multinational pharmaceutical company Grifols SA, based in Barcelona, Spain. That company is now using Canadian plasma to make medications in Grifols’s Montreal plant for sale abroad.
