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Mutual Aid/Best Practices vs Local Practices

_jzhao

This image reminds me of how mutual aid and communities keep each other fed, and safe, and how local practices are actually best practices. My own research, although not immediatley related to the specific public health concern of COVID, will focus on Indigenous food soverignty, particularly the right and autonomy to ferment and distribute alcohol (紅糯米酒) within the Amis community, and their current fight with the local health department on declaring whether or not their alcohol is "safe" for public consumption and distribution.

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erin_tuttle

The author, Adriana Petryna, works as a professor of anthropology for the University of Pennsylvania. She has done extensive research on the cultural and political aspects of nuclear science and medicine.

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erin_tuttle

Schmid argues that previous nuclear disasters, such as Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl demonstrate the need for a nuclear emergency response group with the expertise to handle unexpected disasters as well as public and international support. The article focuses not only on the need for such a group but also on the requirements and challanges such a group would face.

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erin_tuttle

The author, Byron J. Good, is a Harvard professor in the department of global health and social medicine. He is the director of the International Mental Health Training Program, and has significant experience with field research that has led to many publications.

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erin_tuttle

The authors are Paul E. Farmer, Bruce Nizeye, Sara Stulac, and Salmaan Keshavjee. All of the authors are involved with the nonprofit organization Partners in Health in some capacity, with experience working with rural or poverty stricken areas. Paul E Farmer, the primary author of the article is a medical doctor also working for the United Nations who has published many other articles on similar topics.

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erin_tuttle

The film includes perspectives from the doctors, both the oncologists involved in primary care for their patients as well as specialists, both nurses and palliative doctors, to deal with the final months of treatment. The patients and their families provides the other viewpoints, with several families dealing differently with the situations they found themselves in.

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erin_tuttle

The program is well regarded by the public, both international and the Hatian community. Articles have been written in many countries and the program recieved positive news coverege in Hatian news outlets and newspapers. Other emergency response organizations have also taken note of the program, and presented it as a successful relief effort. 

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erin_tuttle

I looked into the aid organization Medicins Sans Frontieres and the incident mentioned in the article where the organization was forced to abandon their operations in Somalia.  The multiple mentions of a lack of data available on violence against aid workers led me to research the Aid Worker Security Database in order to better understand the system for which data was organized. Finally, I was surprised by the mention of government supported violence against aid workers and decided to look into that. There was a significant amount of news concerning government plots and political violence but very little appeared to be reliable or could be corroborated.