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Ecuador Acidification

This PECE essay details the quotidian anthropocene in Ecuador utilizing the Questioning Quotidian Anthropocenes analytic developed for the Open Seminar River School.

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seanw146

Dr. Emily Goldmann graduated from the University of Michigan with her PhD in Epidemiology and Columbia University with a Bachelor’s in economics and Chinese. Dr. Goldmann is currently a clinical assistant Professor of Global Public Health at New York University. “I am currently on the faculty of NYU's College of Global Public Health, in the Division of Social Epidemiology. My current research focuses on the intersection between physical and mental health in older adults, specifically trajectories of depressive symptoms following stroke. I also have a strong interest in the characterization, prevention, and treatment of mental illness in low-resource settings globally. I currently teach a master's level course in global mental health and an introductory course in epidemiology to undergraduate students.” (LinkedIn profile)

 

Dr. Sandro Galea graduated from University of Toronto with his MD, Harvard with a MPH, and Columbia with a DPH. Dr. Galea works as a physician and epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health. “In his scholarship, Dr Galea is centrally interested in the social production of health of urban populations, with a focus on the causes of brain disorders, particularly common mood-anxiety disorders and substance abuse. He has long had a particular interest in the consequences of mass trauma and conflict worldwide, including as a result of the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. ” (Boston University Biography)

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Zackery.White

Sonja D. Schmid is a professor at Virginia Tech in Northern Virginia. Her studies and research focus on “technology policy, qualitative studies of risk, energy policy, and nuclear nonproliferation” as stated on her directory website for VT. She has been an associate professor since 2011 and her current project, such as the article suggests, is investigating the challenges of globalizing nuclear emergency response. She has many published articles including her most recent publication in Global Forum earlier this year titled “What if there’s a next time? Preparedness after Chernobyl and Fukushima - A European-American response.”

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seanw146

1) “The issue at stake is the state's capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge and nonknowledge [sic] to maintain political order.”

2) "Today, approximately 8.9 percent of Ukraine is considered contaminated."

3) “Dr. Guskova, who oversees the Russian compensation In Russia, the number of people considered affected and compensable has been kept to a mini-mum and remains fairly stable… told me that Ukrainians were inflating their numbers of exposed persons, that their so-called invalids ‘didn't want to re- cover.’ She saw the illnesses of this group as a "struggle for power and material resources related to the disaster.”

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seanw146

The author uses a wide variety of news and journal sources to make their point. Everything from the New York Times to East Asian Science. It also cites many volumes on disaster preparedness. For example, “The Chernobyl Accident: a Case Study in International Law Regulation State Responsibility for Transboundary”. The sources tell me that the article was developed around the news at the time and works that dealt with handling of disasters from the past. For me, this furthers the case that the author is making: that the way we have been doing things in the past is not working.

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seanw146

The main point of the article is that doctors need individual stories about patient success stories but that the current medical community has largely done away with this. His argument is that that are needed because of their impact on patients, their use in identifying problems like depression, knowing others have felt the same or have the same condition can give hope, and they can inspire research agendas.

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Zackery.White

Doctors without Borders (MSF) is an organization that provides emergnecy medical aid to communities affeted by conflict, epidemics, disasters, and more. It's composed of mostly physicians and other health care workers, but is accepting of individuals which will help it achieve it's goals. MSF takes a neutral stance on issues as they only strictly abide by medical ethics.

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seanw146

1) “…what would happen if race and insurance status no longer determined who had access to the standard of care?

…in addition to removing some of the obvious economic barriers at the point of care, the clinicians and researchers considered paying for transportation costs and other incentives as well as addressing comorbid conditions ranging from drug addiction to mental illness. They also implemented improvements in community-based care, conceived to make AIDS care more convenient and socially acceptable for patients. The goal was to make sure that nothing within the medical system or the surrounding community prevented poor and otherwise marginalized patients from receiving the standard of care.

The results registered just a few years later were dramatic: racial, gender, injection-drug use, and socioeconomic disparities in outcomes largely disappeared within the study population [35].”

2)            “This model [PIH’s model], with conventional clinic-based (distal) services complemented by home-based (more proximal) care, is deemed by some to be the world's most effective way of removing structural barriers to quality care for AIDS and other chronic diseases.”

3)            “While some interventions are straightforward, we also have to recognize that there is an enormous flaw in the dominant model of medical care: as long as medical services are sold as commodities, they will remain available only to those who can purchase them.”