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Stephen Collier is an Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School in NYC. He has a Ph.D in Anthropology from U.C. Berkeley and has conducted research in Russia, Georgia, and the U.S. His expertise is in political systems (post-socialism and neoliberalism), infrastructure, social welfare, and contemporary security. His knowledge in infrastructure and politics gives him a more top-down perspective of emergency response; Collier can assist with creation of organizations and groups for large scale emergencies that would require international collaboration. 

Andrew Lakoff is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, and is an anthropologist of science and medicine. He research is in globalization processes, human science, and the implications of biomedical technology. He has a similar position in emergency response as Collier, where he sees global, political, and technological interactions that would effect how we prepare and respond to international emergencies. He's written essays and other books on emergency preparedness such as "The Risks of Preparedness: Mutant Bird Flu" and "Disaster & the Politics of Intervention".

The article addresses the inequities in public health by showing how millions of tons of dust from concrete and asbestos were kicked up into the air after the tower collapses of 9/11 and was then determined to be safe per the EPA. A lawsuit was filed against the EPA on behalf of schoolchildren required to attend school in buildings near the site of the collapse and forced to breathe in so-called safe air. Emergency response is not directly addressed however plans of mandating that the EPA pay for the cleanup process are mentioned.

The author is Didier Fassin, a French sociologist and anthropologist who was trained as a physician in internal medicine. He developed the field of critical moral anthropology and currently does research on punishment, asylum, and inequality. This research looks at the social and political forces that affect public health trends, so is not directly involved in emergency response.

The policy was created in 1988; it was created to support previous legislation, such as the Disaster Relief Act of 1970, which was amended in 1974 by President Nixon. 

The policy was created in in 1999 after concerns brought up by the Team Leader of the Chemical Weapons Improved Response Team (CWIRT), U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command over whether first responders to WMD (weapons of mass destruction) incidents were liable for pollution and other environmental consequences of their decontamination/ life-saving efforts.

The article's main points cover the major challenges impeding research studies on violence that affects health service delivery in "complex security environments". The problem isn't lack of data regarding violence affecting health service delivery, but the lack of "health specific" and "gender-disaggregated" data, or data that's not completely tied to humanitarian aid.

The authors suggest several ways to increase research: increased collaboration between academia, NGO's, and health service organizations, inserting a research component in aid operations, and increasing funding to academic and aid organizations.

Emergency response is addressed in this article as mentioned above, stating how it should be the focus of disaster prepardness instead of disaster prevention. Schmid also discusses the important components necessary in an emergency response team including analysis of previous disasters and experience from disaster relief organizations like the UN, and improvisation instead of comparing one disaster to another as no two disasters are identical.

“Yet risk has never been determined solely by individual behavior: susceptibility to infection and poor outcomes is aggravated by social factors such as poverty, gender inequality, and racism”

“we have transplanted and adapted the “PIH model” of care, which was designed in rural Haiti to prevent the embodiment of poverty and social inequalities as excess mortality due to AIDS, TB, malaria, and other diseases of poverty”

“Physicians can rightly note that structural interventions are “not our job.” Yet, since structural interventions might arguably have a greater impact on disease control than do conventional clinical interventions, we would do well to pay heed to them.”

The main argument was that there are "biosocial phenomena" or "structural violence" that lead to the tendency for certain diseases or lack of treatment in populations, particularly those in poverty. Their three major findings were: they can make structural interventions to "decrease the extent to which social inequities become embodied as health inequities", proximal interventions can reduce premature morbidity and mortality, and structural interventions "can have an enormous impact on outcomes.

Almost all of the references cited in the bibliography were taken from Google Scholar, implying that the authors used this database to collaborate on the article through the internet. Many of the articles cited were from Paul Farmer's own works, so he also seems like the main contributor to the article.