Analyze

The article diuscusses the sociopolitical factors effecting populations who were exposed during the chernobyl disaster. It looks at effected population's access to healthcare, and government interventions effecting the post disaster recovery, resettlement, and healthcare. The article establises that there is an entire society built up in the chernobyl effected community which people are entirely dependant on health care systems and the politics governing them take the prescident over many other issues.

Three major ways the arguements are supported are as follows

1. Statistics and analisys of policies pertaining to the healthcare system available to the effected populaitons
2. Historical background to establish where such policies came from and how they may continue to work in the future
3. First hand accounts from both those effected by chernobyl related illness and the health care practitioners who treat them.

1. "Older models of welfare rely on precise definitions situating citizens and their attributes on a cross-mesh of known categories upon which claims rights are based. Here one observes how ambiguities related to categorizing suffering created a political field in which a state, forms of citizenship, and informal economies were remade."

2. "She saw the illness of this group as a "struggle for power" and material resources related to the disaster."

3. "The sufferers and their administrators were also supported by the nonsuffering citizens, who paid a 12 percent tax on their salaries to support compensations"

The author is Adriana Petryna, who is an anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the "public and private forms of scientific knowledge production, as well as on the role of science and technology in public policy". Her work doesn't specifically focus on emergency response, but more on the political and scientific developments that occur in a country after a disaster.

To support its arguements and produce claims, this article uses statistics from the health care system, personal testimonials, and extensive field work.

"Front Line" emergency response is not directly discussed in this article, however long term public health response in a broader sense is referenced extensively, and how the new dependant populations were dealt with was one of the major points of analisys of this article.

According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited in 85 works of various topics including healthcare in neoliberal societies, the post-soviet state, and public healthcare/wellfare.

The bibliography indicates that a large ammount of the information for this article was drawn directly from field work, including interviews with workers at the chernobyl site during the inial response efforts and in the recovery efforts undertaken in the aftermath, as well as effected citizens, officials, and healthcare practitioners involved in the new welfare/healthcare system formed in the aftermath for those who were exposed.

I further researched present undertakings at the chernobyl site for mitigation of nuclear effects, the pathophysiology of radiation poisoning, and how scientific evidance gained from chernobyl has effected how treatment for radiation poisoning is completed.

Adriana Petryna is a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania researches the cultural and political aspects of nuclear science and medicine.