A professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard University, Dr. Byron Good, Ph.D. is an anthropologist who has conducted research on mental illness and the society's perspective on various mental illnesses. He has authored and published numerous research articles, publications, and books on his areas of research.
The authors cite instances of violence against healthcare providers and the environments in which these instances have occured. Anecdotal evidence along with research data on these issues are presented to support the authors' case.
Three quotes that support this are
“Numerous case studies have document that meaningfully engaging lay communities in decisions traditionally made by scientific and technical elites can enable greater vigilance and raise confidence about individual emergency prepardeness.” (Schmid 196)
“So far, the nuclear industry has almost exclusively focused on accident prevention.” … “nuclear emergency preparedness and response has hardly gained traction.” (Schmid 200)
“They created an organization, Spetsatom” … “and with defining generalizable strategies about how to respond to a possible future nuclear emergency” (Schmid 200)
One of the main arguments in this publication is that the spread of illness is often determined by social forces. For example, impoverished individuals may be more susceptible to illness because they cannot afford the proper treatment, not because they are more likely to contract the illness. This is described as structural violence: socio-structural factors that prevent people from achieving their full potential, e.g. receiving medical care.
The report has been cited by many other articles and reports including ones published by the NIH
The main point of this article is to argue how the EPA falsely stated that the air quality around the site of the tower collapses in the day following 9/11 was safe. They argue this by stating that the building was constructed of 2,000 tons of asbestos and 424,000 tons of concrete which generated millions of tons of dust around the site of the collapse, per EPA estimates. They also argue that the EPA is at fault for making false statements of security and should be mandated to fund the cleanup process.
"Moreover, in any mumber of disasters over the past two centuries, the 'disaster investigation,' far from proving itself the dispassionate, scientific verdict on causality and blame, actually emerges as a hard-fought contest to define the moment in politics and society, in technology and culture."
"And, no investigation he could provide would change the fact that most Americans viewed the burning of the Capitol in 1814 as a diplomatic and military, not an engineering, disaster."
"Certainly the move to NIST places a great premium on the power of "investigation" as not only a technical, but also a moral tool, a sacred act, assigning a higher meaning to the tests and calculations that must ultimately assign causes and fix blame--but this is nothing new in American history. While the investigator's tools may have sharpened since Latrobe's study of the Capitol, the Hague Street inquest, or the Iroquois Fire, disaster investigation still pits expert against expert, the demand for patient study against the will to rebuild and forget."