According to the report, most blood sellers were extremely poor men, often unemployed or underemployed laborers living on the margins of Tehran’s rapidly expanding urban landscape. Many were migrants from rural areas who had come to the capital in search of work but found themselves trapped in informal economies.
For these individuals, selling blood was not a one-time act. Some reportedly sold blood repeatedly, returning to hospitals multiple times a month despite the physical toll. Weakness, dizziness, chronic fatigue, and long-term health complications were common, though rarely documented systematically. In the absence of strict medical guidelines, limits on frequency and volume of blood extraction were inconsistently enforced.
The payment—20 tomans for 300 cc of blood—might appear modest or even symbolic to middle-class readers of the time. But for someone struggling to afford bread, rent, or transportation, it represented immediate survival. Blood, in this context, became one of the few assets the poor could liquidate.
