Everyday life between chemistry and landfill: remaking the legacies of industrial modernity
Janine Hauer, M.A. (Researcher), Philipp Baum B.A. (Research assistant)
Janine Hauer, M.A. (Researcher), Philipp Baum B.A. (Research assistant)
The purpose of this program is to educate students to become global leaders (dubbed Phoenix Leaders) in radiation disaster response. The program aims to use experience from the aftermath for Hiroshima to create an overarching program of “Radiation Disaster Recovery Studies”, with multiple disciplines of Medicine, Environmental Studies, Engineering, Sciences, Sociology, Education and Psychology. The eventual aim is to create a new and evolving system of response, safety, and security.
"In the interest of sustainable and socially legitimate solutions, arguably decisions to even the technical responses to disasters should not be left to scientists and engineers alone"
This statement is very thought-provoking and is not exactly expected in a research article - that a scientist's or engineer's decision should be influenced or editied by those without such specific education or expertise.
-balancing point between safety and profitability
-disaster did not happen as a chain of events that made it bound to occur at some point, it happened on a system that was in good shape
-over regulation of the industry and workers results in a lack of flexibility and therefore an inability to be creative in emergency situations
-need emergency response team to be skilled professionally and socially, but on a low budget - and very importantly - cooperation from nuclear corporations
There doesn’t seem to be much coverage for the program, and it is pretty obscure outside of academia.
They are partnered with some of the largest and most prestigious health care companies and institutes in the world, so that helps them to have cutting edge technology and as many resources as possible, given their budget. Those partners may encourage them to use their resources in particular ways, but overall, healthcare is the basis of each partner's goals, so they shouldn't be swayed in unethical ways.
The membership is mostly volunteers. Anyone who volunteers to donate blood, work at a center, or provide care is automatically a member of the organization as a whole. Of course, they have employees as well to provide professional care services and the organization is governed by a board as well as a CEO and President.
Users can search by topic, by category, or by the type of post: field notes, briefing, etc. Rapid Questions can also be asked, which are typically answered within 72 hours.
"'In the globalized world of the 21st Century,'... simply stopping disease at national borders is not adequate"
"Early advocates of such [biodefense] efforts...argued that adequate preparation for a biological attack would require a massive infusion of resources into both biomedical research and public health response capacity"
"Security experts and some life scientists worry that existing biosafety protocols focused on material controls in laboratories will not be sufficient as techniques of genetic manipulation become more powerful and routine, and as expertise in molecular biology becomes increasingly widespread."
"In all of them, we find that health experts, policy advocates, and politicians have competing visions about how to characterize the problem of biosecurity and about what constitutes the most appropriate response. Thus, the question is not just whether certain events (or potential events) have been characterized as "biosecurity" threats that require attention; we also need to ask what kind of biosecurity problem they are seen to pose, what techniques are used to assess them, and how certain kinds of responses to them are justified"
The article shows the fact that EMTs had to step in to prevent police officers from further abusing an inmate/patient. The purpose of EMS is to take care of people that are hurt accidentally or in crimes, not to pull police officers off of patients. This article is purely factual, but shows a very poor example of police "helping" EMTs.
I looked into some of the big fires in America's history as well as the emergency response for them. It is very saddening to see how poor the response was back then and how many lives were lost unnecessarily, but at least we have improved.