In my opinion, something that is ethically wrong with this case is the fact that much of the pollution coming from biomass factories like Enviva are disproportionately affecting Black and Brown rural comminities. These communities experience health issues from the saw dust and can be seen cleaning sawdust off their outside belongings. It is important to see how much thes communities are impacted when looking at biomass corporations.
The complaints of Duplin County residents and the Environmental Justice Community Action Network about general permitting for hog farms in Eastern NC. These permits would give way to more ground and water pollution due to the relaxed regulations on corporate farms that hold multiple different numbers of livestock. Plans for the implementationa pipline called the "Grady Road project" interrupt the family and small scale farms in the ares. A quote from the Duplin County NAACP president Robert O. Moore says:
"The corporation has refused to implement any technology to clean up the water, citing the cost of doing so was too expensive. Yet the cost of this biogas project rivals the cost that would have been to implement cleaner and safer technology to ensure the safety of those living near these operations."
Many local groups in Eastern NC counties have previously tried to receive assistance to help with their agriculture waste managment systems, yet fall short due to many government officials only focusing on corporate farms.
Read more at the link: https://southerlymag.org/2022/03/24/biogas-could-do-more-harm-than-good…
As a researcher, I’m interested in the political, ecological, and cultural debates around mosquito-borne diseases and the solutions proposed to mitigate them.
When we received the task, my first impulse was to investigate about the contemporary effects of anthropogenic climate change in mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans. But I was afraid to make the same mistake that I did in my PhD research. I wrote my PhD proposal while based in the US, more specifically in New England, during the Zika epidemic, and proposed to understand how scientists were studying ecological climate change and mosquitoes in Brazil. However, once I arrived in the country the political climate was a much more pressing issue, with the dismantling of health and scientific institutions.
Thus, after our meeting yesterday, and Jason Ludwig’s reminder that the theme of our Field Campus is the plantation, I decided to focus on how it related to mosquitoes in New Orleans.
The Aedes aegypti mosquito and the yellow fever virus it can transmit are imbricated in the violent histories of settler-colonialism and slavery that define the plantation economy. The mosquito and the virus arrived in the Americas in the same ships that brought enslaved peoples from Africa. The city of New Orleans had its first yellow fever epidemic in 1796, with frequent epidemics happening between 1817 and 1905. What caused New Orleans to be the “City of the Dead,” as Kristin Gupta has indicated, was yellow fever. However, as historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby points out, the slave trade cannot explain alone the spread and persistance of the disease in the region: "Alterations to the landscape, combined with demographic changes resulting from the rise of sugar production, slavery, and urban growth all contributed to the region’s development as a yellow fever zone." For example, sugar cultivation created ideal conditions for mosquito proliferation because of the extensive landscape alteration and ecological instabilities, including heavy deforestation and the construction of drainage ditches and canals.
Historian Kathryn Olivarius examines how for whites "acclimatization" to the disease played a role in hierarchies with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people and how for black enslaved people "who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their white owners, strengthening the set of racialized assumptions about the black body bolstering racial slavery."
As I continue to think through these topics, I wonder how both the historical materialities of the plantation and the contemporary anthropogenic changes might be influencing mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans nowadays? And more, how the regions’ histories of race and class might still be shaping the effects of these diseases and how debates about them are framed?
In the case of this study, the vulnerable population examined was healthcare workers in Sierra Leone during the outbreak. These workers were found to be at a significant level of risk for transmission for a number of reasons. These include proximity to the virus (due to the occupation), lack of training in the area of infection control, and cultural factors (such as prevalence of self-medication and home management of illness). Nurses as a whole were most affected, with over half of the infected members.
The policy was created in response to adverse health effects of the 9/11/2001 attacks in NYC. The act is an ammendment ot the Public Health Service Act.
As far as persuasive goes, the entire film was very convincing of the fact that the doctors were under-resourced and over-worked. The part where the doctors were trying to perform a surgery and didn't have the right kind of drill to relieve the pressure in the brain was pretty compelling. Here we would never consider drilling into someone's brain without the proper sterilization, apparatus, or drill, but in such a low resource clinic, its the only option. That just shows how desperate the doctors were to perform their craft andbest serve their patients. Another part that was convincing was the portion where the doctors argued about reusing gloves. It was a bit hard to understand the argument, as the concept is just baffling to me as a hcp, but the fact that they had to disagree over washing and reusing gloves is proof of their desperation.
The article explains how a team of medical staff treated (and consequently killed) a number of patients following the flooding of a hospital in New Orleans. The staff in question overdosed the patients to put them out of their pain as they saved other patients who were more likely to survive. The article calls into question the process of triage and how we go about it. Who has the authority to make these decisions, and what lines do we draw between ethics and compassion. The article provides a play-by-play of the events leading up to the flooding, and relevant policies that existed and have been created related to this incident.
The author addresses emergency response in the context of the workers who responded to and continue to work at the site of the chernobyl nuclear disaster. These workers were monetarily compensated in high ammounts, but left physically injured and disabled by the exposure to radioactivity at the site.
It seems that quite a few people use the platform, including, but not limited to, docotrs, nurses, and ems personnel.
The policy and much current conversation stems from gun control laws, increasing violence against law/fire/ems in the media, and an increasingly large population of volatile persons. EMS do not always feel safe on scene, even when it appears otherwise.