Mae Jemison by Xina M. Uhl

Author:Xina M. Uhl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
Published: 2019-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

President John F. Kennedy signs the 1961 Peace Corps Bill in the White House. As of September 2018, more than 235,000 Americans have served in the Peace Corps.

Jemison served as the area Peace Corps medical officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia. That means she was the general manager for the Peace Corps’ health care system in those two areas. What does a general manager do? Mae Jemison was only twenty-six years old, and she was responsible for taking care of the health of all the US Peace Corps volunteers, staff members, embassy personnel of Sierra Leone, and the Peace Corps volunteers in Liberia. She managed a medical office, a laboratory, a pharmacy, and volunteer health training. She was also the primary care doctor, which meant that everybody went to her first before being assigned to another doctor. All of the volunteers came to her for their assignments, too. She was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for two and a half years.

During her time in West Africa, Mae Jemison treated diseases that she had only read about in textbooks. She worked with some of the best doctors and nurses in Sierra Leone. The medical equipment was, at times, barely adequate for their purposes. It was always a challenge to get the supplies and the equipment needed. While she was working in Sierra Leone, Jemison not only helped others as a doctor, she tried to help them take care of their own health. She wrote manuals for self-care. She wrote and enforced guidelines for public health and safety. She did research on a hepatitis B vaccine, rabies, and schistosomiasis, an illness that you can get from any one of five species of waterborne flatworms called schistosomes. The parasite can also be found in snails, which is why the disease is sometimes called snail fever. She did this work with the help of two prestigious American health organizations, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.