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Mutual Aid/Best Practices vs Local Practices

_jzhao
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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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wolmad
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The Red Cross opened a Red Cross R&D in 1961 to further existing research on blood component technology, blood safety, plasma-derived therapeutics, transfusion medicine, and biomedical science. Red Cross R&D has made accievements in the following areas, listed on their website:

  • Developed a technique to freeze red blood cells, preserving their viability for up to 3 years, helping to ensure a steady supply of red cells for patients needing rare blood types. (1971)
  • Contributed to the development of bar-coding for blood products. (1977)
  • Developed procedures for large-scale purification of therapeutic blood proteins like gamma globulin and factor VIII. (1978)
  • Collaborated with scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to define the window period—the length of time between infection with the virus and the earliest stage in infection that can be detected by a test—for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) following implementation of universal HIV testing of donor blood. (1994)
  • Investigated the prevalence of blood-transmitted diseases like human T-lymphotropic virus-1 (HTLV-1) and Chagas disease, providing key data that led to implementation of testing for these diseases. (HTLV-1 in 1987, Chagas disease in 2008)
  • Continue to facilitate improvements in bacterial testing of blood products.
  • Investigated the role of antibodies in female-source plasma in causing transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI), leading to reduction in the incidence of TRALI by providing male-predominant plasma for transfusion. (2009)
  • Modified height and weight restrictions for donors younger than 19, which has significantly reduced adverse reactions among young donors. (2009)

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wolmad
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Based on this article's bibliography, it appears that a large ammount of information from this article was drawn from MSF reports and essays, United Nations reports, and previous scholarly research done in the fields of humanitarianism, feminism, and the social aspects of medicine.

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wolmad
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The authors of the article are Andrew Lakoff and Stephen Collier, both of whom are anthropologists. Andrew Lakoff works at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Stephen Collier works at The New School in New York City. The two focus a large ammount of their studies on international studies and biopolitics, and have collaborated on a number of papers pertaining to these topics. One of Lakoff's most current works is a book called Disaster and the Politics of Intervention, which may be relivant ot the the DSTS network.

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wolmad
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This article has been referenced in various other articles in the DSTS field, including Engineering Risk and Disaster: Disaster-STS and the American History of Technology (S. Knowles) and The World Trade Center Analyses: Case Study of Ethics, Public Policy and the Engineering Profession (WH Coste).