TIL. Thank you!

Yep! US allows plasma donation up to two times per week, with at least 48 hours between donations.

Can't donate plasma or blood for 8 weeks after donating whole blood, or 16 weeks after donating packed RBCs.

Packed RBCs are basically the reverse of plasma donation. Instead of returning the RBCs and keeping the plasma, they take two units of RBCs and return the plasma.

It’s so much worse than you realize. All blood and plasma must be obtained by “donation” for obvious ethical reasons, but American prisoners get incentives for participation/punishment for non-participation. Private American medical companies make billions of dollars in profit every year selling blood on the international market, but the prisoners don’t see a dime of it. The sellers are so unscrupulous that they have been caught knowingly selling tainted prisoner blood, and continuing to do so after being caught.

They centrifuge your blood and return the RBCs, but the PFAS hangs out in the plasma. Mostly. If there was much in the red blood cells, the liver would be removing it and you'd be pooping it out.

For PFAS, yes, definitely. They've done studies on this, some are linked elsewhere in the thread. PFAS in the bloodstream is removed through either whole blood or plasma donation.

For microplastics, I can't say with absolute certainty, as I don't know the concentration of microplastics in the blood, or if replacement blood/plasma contains microplastics. But, the mechanism is the same: extract polluted fluids; allow body to replace with non-polluted fluids. Concentration of pollution falls.