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“legal protection for sick people was still considerably reduced by a decision of the European court of human rights… a Ugandan woman suffering from an advanced stage of AIDS. The court refused the women’s appeal [to stay in Britain for medical reasons] and authorized her deportation."

“Sometimes the foreigner, too, is no more than his body, but this body is no longer the same: useless to the political economy, it now finds its place in a new moral economy that values suffering over labor and compassion more than rights.”

 “The logic of state sovereignty in the control of immigration clearly prevailed over the universality of the principle of the right to life. The compassion protocol had met its limit.”

Andrew Lakoff is a cultural anthropologist at University of Southern California. He studies social theory and medical anthropology.

Stephen Collier is a doctor of philosophy, derpartment of Anthropology, at the University of California Berkeley. He also studies social theory and social policy.

Both have studied policies on medical aid and global health.

Some othe rpublications:

"Vaccine Politics and the Management of Public Reason"

"Global Health Security and the Pathogenic Imaginary"

"Real-Time Biopolitics: The Actuary and the Sentinel in Global Public Health"

"Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency"

The main argument of this article is that there needs to be more of a focus on emergency response to nuclear disasters and less directed toward nuclear safety and that safety/emergency response should take a higher priority than company trademarks. She claims that nuclear emergency response should be more of an international response and less of a single nation response. 

"As a result, however, the stories were often quite ambiguous as to the nature of the illness, and it was often unclear whether the stories were "reports of experience" or were largely governed by a typical cultural form or narrative structure"

"Stories, perhaps better than other forms, provide a glimpse of the grand ideas that often seem to elude life and defy rational description. Illness stories often seem to provide an especially fine mesh for catching such ideas. 

"much of what we know about illness we know through stories - stories told by the sick about their experiences, by family members, doctors, healers, and others in the society. This is a simple fact. "An illness" has a narrative structure, although it is not a closed text, and it is composed as a corpus of stories."