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VERSION:2.0
PRODID:icalendar-ruby
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:Social Life of Medicine - How Medicine Becomes Trash: Healthca
 re Waste as Environmental Crisis
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Pacific Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20261006T160217Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_44005959528688
DTSTART:20231025T190000Z
DTEND:20231025T203000Z
DESCRIPTION:"How Medicine Becomes Trash: Healthcare Waste as Environmental 
 Crisis"\nJeremy Greene\, MD\, PhD\, William H. Welch Professor of Medicine
  and History of Medicine\; Director\, Institute of the History of Medicine
 \; Director\, Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine\, John Hopki
 ns University\n\n\nRSVP here\n \n\nThe modern medical enterprise is distin
 ctively wasteful.  This may seem to result inevitably from the hazardous n
 ature of medical substances\, whose infection risk\, chemical toxicity\, o
 r radioactivity and accordingly requires more extensive techniques of wast
 e handling.  Yet only 15% of global healthcare wastes fit this specialized
  profile.  The remaining 85% are simply materials that have been built to 
 be disposable rather than reusable:  a staggering volume of single-use ite
 ms that emit toxins and carbon dioxide when incinerated\, give off methane
  and other greenhouse gases while decomposing in landfills\, or\, if they 
 escape these two fates\, float on the surface of the oceans.\n \n\nIt was 
 not always this way.  In a relatively short period of time\, we have natur
 alized the use of single-use masks\, single-use surgical drapes\, single-u
 se plastic syringes\, single-use surgical tools\, and single-use diagnosti
 c tests\, all wrapped in multiple layers of single-use plastics—and then
  forgotten there was ever any alternative.  In this lecture\, Jeremy Green
 e traces the links between environmental history\, the history of technolo
 gy\, and the outsized role that the global healthcare sector now plays in 
 contributing to climate change and plastic waste.  Greene the recent crisi
 s of COVID-waste as a window into the broader infrastructure of engineered
  wastefulness in modern medicine and its differential effects across rich 
 and poor nations on a global scale\, and rich and poor neighborhoods on mo
 re local scales.  Only through historical analysis\, he argues\, can we wo
 rk to unseat medical waste as a natural category and reconsider it as the 
 outcome of a set of value decisions we have made in the past\, and can cha
 nge in the future. \n\n \n\nThis event is co-sponsored by the USC Dornsife
  Center on Science\, Technology\, and Public Life\, USC Dornsife Departmen
 t of Anthropology\, the USC Keck Narrative Medicine Program\, and the Cons
 ortium for the Social and Ethical Dimensions of Medicine.
GEO:34.02023;-118.28575
LOCATION:Student Union (STU)\, 101
SUMMARY:Social Life of Medicine - How Medicine Becomes Trash: Healthcare Wa
 ste as Environmental Crisis
URL;VALUE=URI:https://calendar.usc.edu/event/social_life_of_medicine
CATEGORIES:Lecture / Talk / Workshop
CATEGORIES:Conference/Symposia
CATEGORIES:Sustainability
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