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The bibliography of this article shows that it was written using the data and observations available in many other papers, and interviews conducted previously. It does not appear that any new data was gathered specifically for this article.

The government should not edit the EPA's notices and warnings.

There should be far more safety information given to first responders and people living/working in a dangerous area. If they are not actively saving lives, they should not be risking their own lives - like in the rubble cleanup for 9/11.

This article was primarily supported by it's cited work. It combined and summarized many research reports and other articles. They broke it down into sections that flowed in a reasonable manner and supported each statement with a reference number.

• “The legacy of Chernobyl has been used as a means of signaling Ukraine's domestic and international legitimacy and staking territorial claims; and as a venue of governance and state building, social welfare, and corruption.” (253)
• “In a place of tremendous economic desperation, people competed for work in the Zone of Exclusion, where salaries were relatively high and steadily paid. Prospective workers engaged in a troubling cost-benefit assessment that went some- thing like this: if I work in the Zone, I lose my health. But I can send my son to law school.” (253)
• “The issue at stake is the state's capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge and nonknowledge to maintain political order.” (258)

"Among inhabitants of Kyiv and other urban centers, there is a growing consensus that the invalids are "parasites of the state, dam aging the economy, not paying taxes." Many youths who had been evacuated from the zone do not want to be associated with groups of sufferers as this association makes it more difficult for them to find employment.

"Another administrator who authenticated com pensation claims told me illnesses had become a form of currency. "There are a lot of people out of work," he said. "People don't have enough money to eat. The state doesn't give medicines for free anymore. Drug stores are commercialized." He likened his work to that of a bank. "The diagnosis we write is money.""

"Symon Lavrov, was well-regarded internationally for having developed computerized fallout models and calculating population-wide doses in the post-Soviet period. He told me, how ever, that "when a crying mother comes to my laboratory and asks me, Professor Lavrov, 'tell me what's wrong with my child?' I assign her a dose and say nothing more. I double it, as much as I can." The offer of a higher dose increased the likelihood that the mother would be able to secure social protection on account of her potentially sick child.""

A method used to support the claim is to relate the potential future disasters in the nuclear industry to historical examples which gives credence to the claims in the article and provide relatable evidence to the reader as to the risks associated with not only the nuclear industry but also a lack of preparedness for nuclear disasters. Data used to support the claim includes case studies that the author analyzed as a part of the article, and several other works were cited. 

• “… illness narratives - both the corpus of story episodes and the larger life "story" or illness narrative to which they contribute - have elements in common with fiction. They have a plot; succession is ordered as history or event, given configuration.” (164)
• “The diverse accounts of the illness in these narratives represent alternative plots, a telling of the story in different ways, each implying a different source of efficacy and the possibility of an alternative ending to the story. My point is not that persons having access to a plural medical system do not simply choose among alternative forms of healing but instead draw on all of them” (155)
• “Predicament, human striving, and an unfolding in time toward a conclusion are thus central to the syntax of human stories, and all of these, as we will see, are important to stories about illness experience.” (145)

Stories are important in medicine. Numbers are important too, but sometimes the stories can tell particular cases of success, where numbers would brush over or fail to show the significance. Stories can tell much more than numbers sometimes, and that must be regocnized and appreciated. Especially in specialties where it is hard to always measure data, quotes, stories, and recollections can be more accurate.

“Pioneers of modern public health during the nineteenth century, such as Rudolph Virchow, understood that epidemic disease and dismal life expectancies were tightly linked to social conditions [55,56].” (Farmer 5)

“…large­-scale social forces—racism, gender inequality, poverty, political violence and war, and sometimes the very policies that address them—often determine who falls ill and who has access to care.” (Farmer 1)

“In an attempt to address these ethnic disparities in care, researchers and clinicians in Baltimore reported how racism and poverty— forms of structural violence, though they did not use these specific terms—were embodied [33,34] as excess mortality among African Americans without insurance.” (Farmer 2)

The author Miriam Ticktin is a professor of Anthropology at the New School, she has worked in the fields of Women’s Studies and English Literature. Her research focuses on medicine and science and its connection to feminist theory.