Sugar plantations, Chemical Plants, COVID-19
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The chemical plants in Cancer Alley are built where there once were sugar plantations. Descendants of enslaved communities still live nearby.
The chemical plants in Cancer Alley are built where there once were sugar plantations. Descendants of enslaved communities still live nearby.
Join us for the Disaster STS Network’s Fall 2021 virtual tour of Louisiana's Cancer Alley, a corridor of chemical plants along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans with shockin
I teach anthropology and environmental studies at Haveford College, just outside of Philly. Currently, I'm holed up in a cabin in the Adirondacks in upstate New York with several family members, including my spouse and 4 year old daughter and 3 dogs. I started working on disasters by accident, when one day in 2001 I was walking to class at NYU and saw the World Trade Center buildings on flames. I have known Kim for a few year and I contacted her to connect with folks around Covid-19 and its imacts.
I'm particularly intersted in issues of communal grief, mourning, and bereavement. Also, I'm interested in the religious response to Covid-19.
Emergency response isn't explicitly addressed in the article, but in order to incorporate structural interventions into public health, emergency response would have to be improved as well. As the article states, there are many "diseases of poverty" and medical emergencies would be more common in those populations. Noting these trends can streamline medical response and help with providing education/ resources to prevent emergencies.
On the ResearchGate website, the article was cited 28 times in other works; the top 3 studies/ articles were: "A Pre-Event Configuration for Biological Threats", "Airports, localities and disease", and "Repositioning the Front Lines?: Reflections on the Ethnography of African Stereotypes".
The program was funded by NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, who gave $15 million to create the college.
The study analyzes the high incarceration rates in the U.S. as an epidemic connected to the lack of public health resources available to populations being arrested.
The main findings in the article include the development of mental health disorders in disaster victims, looking at risks, psychopathology, course of the disorders, prevention, treatment and recovery.