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The policy is to extend Good Samaritan laws to first responders so that they would not be liable for "spreading contamination while attempting to save lives."

Miriam Ticktin is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at The New School For Social Research in New York City. Her research focuses on "what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity" and more recently looks at humanitarianism at various levels. For emergency response her work focuses more on response done for humanitarian aid and displaced peoples. 

http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty/?id=4d54-6379-4e44-4d35

The author is Sonja D. Schmid, an associate professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology in Society. She specializes in STS (science, tech, and society) analysis, nuclear industries, and energy policies. In respect to emergency response, Schmid is able to use her knowledge of previous disasters, current energy technologies, and societal influences to address what we need nationally/ internationally for how we should respond to emergencies. The ability to identify the multifaceted levels of what causes disasters is important to properly responding to them- by changing technologies, training and education of communities, and changing energy policies to avoid and handle more disaster.

Publications relevant to the DSTS Network: "Evacuation from a nuclear disaster" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/214548?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents), "A comparative institutional analysis of the Fukushima nuclear disaster: Lessons and policy implications" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421512009433)

Research focusing on nuclear waste management, developments for safer nuclear energy and studies of the nuclear arms race are also relevant to DSTS Network.

1. USAID and their contributions to Haiti

2. The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and their impact

3. The United Nations and if they've been sued by Haiti for cholera epidemic

The report implies that technical professionals have to be more careful when responding to large scale disasters; staff responding to emergencies need to have more training for the many internal challenges that would lmit care and assistance to victims. MSF discussed how they had limited man power, labs, and resources.

Disaster investigations look at the emergency response that followed the incident, either the timing or actions taken to save human lives. There's more about the investigations calling for improved emergency preparedness; policies and technology development to prevent disasters such as the Hague Street Explosion (1850) which involved a faulty boiler (and other factors) and the Iroquois theater fire (1903) which led to changed theater building policies. 

The policy doesn't specifically address the elderly or children, who are very vulnerable populations during disasters/ emergencies (but it does address pets and animals in Title IV).

The central argument is that healthcare professionals are not trained well enough in mentally/ emotionally handling patient relationships when providing end-of-life care for terminal/ chronic illnesses.

1. There is also a need for further assessment of the impact of violence, both on facilities and organizations, and also on populations served. These knowledge gaps have serious implications for the way the drivers of violence are understood and, by extension, the ability of organizations operating in complex security environments ability to effectively manage the security of their staff and facilities in order to deliver healthcare.

2. Within medical anthropology and sociology, violence is seen a social phenomenon that is culturally structured and interpreted, and the human body can serve as a site of contestation, where various types of power relations play out at individual-, community-, state- and global-level levels.

3. In the same vein, training among health workers and patients in complex security about the importance of reporting attacks and different reporting fora may reduce the number of incidents that go unreported and the accuracy and completeness of those which are reported.

This article used data from Baltimore about AIDS care, and the authors' research in Rwanda, discussing results from the Partners in Health structural interventions and comparing them to produce their claims.