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Some residents of flooded homes in Three Rivers/Woodlake blame new housing developments that replaced orchards and a creek bed for recent flooding

Farmers drove pickup trucks loaded with dirt into a breached levee, then covered the trucks with dirt

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 smell of death was overpowering the moment a relief worker cracked open one of the hospital chapel’s wooden doors.”

“The physician, Anna Pou, defended herself on national television, saying her role was to “help” patients “through their pain,” a position she maintains today.”

From the links provided within the article, relevant information about Hurricane Katrina can be viewed with the commentary and archival articles that published in The New York Times that written by other authors.

Also the author has made in contact with Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans to focus on the investigation into the detail situations happened with the floodwaters. Afterwards, gained more information on the lethal injection issues.

[http://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/hurricane-katrina?inline=nyt-class…]

[http://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/hurricanes-and-tropical-storms-hur…]

The article has first emphasis the number of death and corpses during and after the Hurricane Katrina, then with further investigation and research, the issue related to the lethal injection to the patient has raised. From the physician’s perspective, the lethal injection in this case is a way to relief the patient’s pain, as it is a “for” for the lethal injection, which not seems to be violating the medical ethical. From the conclusion parts of the article, the author provided the evidence that “that more medical professionals were involved in the decision to inject patients — and far more patients were injected — than was previously understood.”     

The main focus group of the article is the physicians that involved in the injection decision to the patients. The discussion to the article questioned on the ethical issue towards overdose injection in order to “help” the patients to relief their pains that causes the death to the patients.  

"Anna Pou, defended herself on national television, saying her role was to “help” patients “through their pain,” a position she maintains today"

"The laws also encourage prosecutors to await the findings of a medical panel before deciding whether to prosecute medical professionals. Pou has also been advising state and national medical organizations on disaster preparedness and legal reform; she has lectured on medicine and ethics at national conferences and addressed military medical trainees"

The author conducted their research for the article through a personal interview with one of the doctors who worked at the Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans. 

The main point of this article is the idea that government regulations do not always comply with what is best for patient care and the situation at hand. In this particular case doctors and nurses decided to euthanize patients who were in critical condition and were going to be delayed or unable to be rescued.