COVID 19 PLACES: ECUADOR
This essay supports an upcoming discussion of how COVID-19 is unfolding in Ecuador and a broader discussion within the Transnational STS COVID-19 project.
Ecuador Place Essay Image
Image created with the use of a free image by Crystal Mirallegro (Unsplash website) for Ecuador's covid19 place essay
Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography
A research Center at the University of Cuenca with the collaboration of FLACSO-Ecuador
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wolmadIn this film, three groups of stakeholders are portrayed; doctors, patients, and mortality. The doctors depicted fight a loosing battle against aging, death, and terminal illness like cancer. They need to come to terms with the fact that they can't save everyone and they need to honor their patients wishes for how they want to conduct the end of their lives. The patients need to accept their impending death with the assistance of their doctors and advocate for how they want to conduct the end of their lives. And mortality is an object which is immaterial but ever present, and both doctors and patients need to learn how to grasp with it.
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wolmadThis policy was innitially well recieved and was quickly ratified by a number of countries with major nuclear capabilities. However after the Fukushima Disaster, this policy and other international policies were percieved by the public to be slow and inefficient in spreading vital information.
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wolmadThis article utilizes excerpts from interviews to illustrate the story narrative of an illness, showing how emotion and values are reflected in the creation of a "plot" of the narrative, and uses statistics and broader research to analize these stories from a broader, more societal perspective.
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wolmadThe Red Cross opened a Red Cross R&D in 1961 to further existing research on blood component technology, blood safety, plasma-derived therapeutics, transfusion medicine, and biomedical science. Red Cross R&D has made accievements in the following areas, listed on their website:
- Developed a technique to freeze red blood cells, preserving their viability for up to 3 years, helping to ensure a steady supply of red cells for patients needing rare blood types. (1971)
- Contributed to the development of bar-coding for blood products. (1977)
- Developed procedures for large-scale purification of therapeutic blood proteins like gamma globulin and factor VIII. (1978)
- Collaborated with scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to define the window period—the length of time between infection with the virus and the earliest stage in infection that can be detected by a test—for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) following implementation of universal HIV testing of donor blood. (1994)
- Investigated the prevalence of blood-transmitted diseases like human T-lymphotropic virus-1 (HTLV-1) and Chagas disease, providing key data that led to implementation of testing for these diseases. (HTLV-1 in 1987, Chagas disease in 2008)
- Continue to facilitate improvements in bacterial testing of blood products.
- Investigated the role of antibodies in female-source plasma in causing transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI), leading to reduction in the incidence of TRALI by providing male-predominant plasma for transfusion. (2009)
- Modified height and weight restrictions for donors younger than 19, which has significantly reduced adverse reactions among young donors. (2009)
This audio was sent by Manuel Maiche, community leader of Kuamar, part of the Shuar territory in Ecuador.