Disallowing Life to the Point of Death

I found it very interesting to read Michael Foucault’s  “Right of Death and Power over Life” in conjunction with the articles from Adriana Petryna. The framework Foucault presented in his book laid a great foundation for how to look at Petryna’s articles. Foucault said that the “ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (pg. 138). This quote kept ringing out in my mind while reading the articles about Chernobyl, because nothing was done with this incident to foster life. Government and politics ignored the disaster and the effects it could have on people to the point that many people died after the disaster or developed life-limiting illnesses. As Petryna discussed in her “Biological Citizens” article, there was no formal announcement about what had happened at the plant until three weeks after the fact (pg. 252). Because of this slow response, people suffered. People were exposed to the radiation because they did not have the knowledge of what had happened. People were destined to develop thyroid cancer and other diseases because there was such a delayed response. There was no help to try to prevent the onset of these diseases, even though there were available treatments, like the nonradioactive iodine pills. Because of the slow response, now almost 9% of people living in the Ukraine contaminated by the radiation (pg. 255).

It surprises me how unwilling to respond and help government was. They basically sentenced those people living around Chernobyl to death by not stepping in and trying to help. As Foucault talked about, in the past people were outright sentenced to death by the king and authorities. Nowadays, many countries reserve the death sentence to only the most severe criminals, if they even have the death sentence at all. But with this disaster, many innocent people were sentenced to die because the government did not act quick enough to disseminate medicines they had that could have prevented disease. Moreover than just the slow response, they continually deny to allow research to be conducted so the effects of radiation poisoning could be chronicled and if another disaster similar to this happened, people would be more prepared. It upsets me that the government doesn’t see the benefits of research being conducted with people, especially given the fact that research is being conducted about how Chernobyl affected other species and ecosystems. If they are trying to see how this affected the environment, why are they not trying to research how this affected humans?