Search

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) drafted the policy. 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The main findings are about gender based violence in armed conflicts and the political implications of addressing gender based violence (separating and giving special treatment versus treating everyone as neutral) in humanitarian aid efforts.

Sexual violence has a place in humanitarianism; when it comes to getting treatment in humanitarian aid efforts gender-based violence is recognized as a "crime against humanity" that needs to be addressed as they are common in armed conflicts. 

Gender-based violence is approached as both a medical and health issue; the immediate wounds as the result of gender based violence (usually sexual violence) is focused on for treatment in emergencies but the deeper issue of the "rape epidemic" resulting from the system/ culture is not "treated".

Three quotes that support this are

“Numerous case studies have document that meaningfully engaging lay communities in decisions traditionally made by scientific and technical elites can enable greater vigilance and raise confidence about individual emergency prepardeness.” (Schmid 196)

“So far, the nuclear industry has almost exclusively focused on accident prevention.” … “nuclear emergency preparedness and response has hardly gained traction.” (Schmid 200)

“They created an organization, Spetsatom” … “and with defining generalizable strategies about how to respond to a possible future nuclear emergency” (Schmid 200)

One of the main arguments in this publication is that the spread of illness is often determined by social forces. For example, impoverished individuals may be more susceptible to illness because they cannot afford the proper treatment, not because they are more likely to contract the illness. This is described as structural violence: socio-structural factors that prevent people from achieving their full potential, e.g. receiving medical care.

Teach 3.11 was developed to serve students and general public. It allows the public to have more access to different books, teaching material, and research regarding disasters. The website was built in response to the Fukushima disaster of 2011, in order to provide "an educational space for understanding the history, memory, and context of social disasters" (Teach 3.11). The editorial team has members from different countries, reflecting the international collaboration that natural and nuclear disasters require. With it's availability in six different languages, public contribution and comments enabled on articles gives a global platform for discussion and sharing. They are currently accepting papers for their "Terms of Disaster" collection.

The report has been cited by many other articles and reports including ones published by the NIH

Increased funding from the U.N., distribution of cholera vaccines, focus on poorer populations to educate and give access to medications/water, and clean up of the Arbonite River.

The main point of this article is to argue how the EPA falsely stated that the air quality around the site of the tower collapses in the day following 9/11 was safe. They argue this by stating that the building was constructed of 2,000 tons of asbestos and 424,000 tons of concrete which generated millions of tons of dust around the site of the collapse, per EPA estimates. They also argue that the EPA is at fault for making false statements of security and should be mandated to fund the cleanup process.

The report has several small sections dedicated to possible ways the MSF could have responded better to the 2014 ebola outbreak; such as the medical challenges they faced, MSF challenges within the organization, and a "Looking to the future" about the importance of learning lessons from this epidemic.