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UK Food Bank

AmandaWindle
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In response to

https://twitter.com/bateswalsall1/status/1264308701269233665?s=20

The twitter link above shows a video of a foodbank near where I live in London in a shopping centre in Elephant and Castle. This is a foodbank queue for the unemployed and those receiving benefits. This is not a queue for the homeless. It also shows close proximity and in some places the inability to distance and follow national guidance.

Additional information from WHO - Compound Vulnerabilities

AmandaWindle
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In response to

"Currently, there are no studies on the survival of the COVID-19 virus in drinking-water or sewage. The morphology and chemical structure of this virus are similar to those of other coronavirusesa for which there are data about both survival in the environment and effective inactivation measures. This guidance draws on the existing evidence base and current WHO guidance on how to protect against viruses in sewage and drinking-water."

and 

"The COVID-19 virus is enveloped and thus less stable in the environment compared to non-enveloped human enteric viruses with known waterborne transmission (such as adenoviruses, norovirus, rotavirus and hepatitis A). "

Link: Water, sanitation, hygiene, and waste management for the COVID-19 virus, Interim guidance, 23 April 2020 by WHO and UNICEF: https://www.who.int/publications-detail/water-sanitation-hygiene-and-wa…

These excerpts from WHO regs, relate to Aalok Khandekar’s draft commentary, “Heat and Contagion in the Off-Grid City”  in relation to mentioning hepatitis.

And, also to a comment in previous weeks around air transmission and sewage across the border in north and south America made by Kim Fortun 

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Sara.Till
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In response to

Byron Good, Ph.D., is a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. His primary area of research is mental illness and how social perceptions evolves around these issues, in terms of both treatment and social acceptance. Dr. Good has several works on these issues, including several that explore the perspective of bio-medicine in non-western medical knowledge, the cultural meaning of mental illness, and patient narrative during illness. His publications including several papers, books, and edited volumes; he is regarded as a major contributor to the field of psychological anthropology. 

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Sara.Till
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The article primarily asserts that how a patient narrates or describes their medical history is deeply rooted in their native culture. As such, physicians must be aware of how an individual's medical experiences can be altered based on this. In turn, physicians must recognize the importance of story-telling and anecdotes when receiving information directly from patients. Narratives project the patient's experience and events through their perspective, granting professionals a glimpse into their thought processes and action patterns.

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erin_tuttle
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In response to

The author, Byron J. Good, is a Harvard professor in the department of global health and social medicine. He is the director of the International Mental Health Training Program, and has significant experience with field research that has led to many publications.

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erin_tuttle
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In response to

The article’s main argument is that the narration of an illness is founded in the emotional connection it has to the sufferers life, the place from which they view the illness which includes individual and cultural aspects. Furthermore any lack of factual accuracy is an indicator of the social and cultural environment in which the illness presents itself and is revealing as to how it will be perceived and treated.

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erin_tuttle
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In response to

The main argument is supported primarily through interviews with many individuals living in Ankara, through which they describe the first presentation of their seizures and in many cases the steps they tool to attempt a cure. Along with the interviews, statistics of the individuals interviewed and their diagnoses is used to provide a reference point to better understand their stories. Finally the article includes an analysis of narratives in a more general sense that can be applied to the narrative of an illness.

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erin_tuttle
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In response to
  • “… illness narratives - both the corpus of story episodes and the larger life "story" or illness narrative to which they contribute - have elements in common with fiction. They have a plot; succession is ordered as history or event, given configuration.” (164)
  • “The diverse accounts of the illness in these narratives represent alternative plots, a telling of the story in different ways, each implying a different source of efficacy and the possibility of an alternative ending to the story. My point is not that persons having access to a plural medical system do not simply choose among alternative forms of healing but instead draw on all of them” (155)
  • “Predicament, human striving, and an unfolding in time toward a conclusion are thus central to the syntax of human stories, and all of these, as we will see, are important to stories about illness experience.” (145)

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erin_tuttle
Annotation of
In response to

Emergency response is not addressed in this article however it does provide emergency responders with insight into the stories those suffering from illness will have to explain their suffering. As emergency responders will often be working in societies and cultures very different form their own in the case of disaster response, it is important to understand that what may seem like fiction in a story cannot be dismissed without considering the deeper cultural significance of those elaborations.