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Gary Slutkin Essay

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The constant red flashes of ambulances illuminate the neighborhoods of Chicago. The streets are ghostly and barren. Like a scene from of a global pandemic movie, bodies litter the street. However, instead of a cinematic fantasy, this disease is quite real. Its name is Violence. As epidemiologist and leader of Cure Violence, Gary Slutkin, sees it, violence is just as much a disease as HIV, Bubonic Plague, Leprosy, and most recently Ebola Virus due to the way it spreads, clusters and is cured (James 2011). Therefore, violence should be treated in the same way as contagious disease. Dr. Gary Slutkin graduated from University of Chicago with a medical degree in 1975. Following his training, he left the United States to live in a camp in Somalia with over one million refugees. As he mentioned in his Ted Talk, his responsibility was to inhibit infectious diseases that plagued the people such as tuberculosis and cholera (Slutkin …show more content…
By investing time to become acquainted with the area and social structure, Slutkin was bale to devise three steps to efficiently decrease violence. (Easterly, 2007) The first step in Slutkin’s plan to end violence was to interrupt transmission. In order for this to be accomplished, one must detect and find first cases. This is where Interrupters are implemented to prevent shootings by reasoning with the gangs and “cooling down” potentially violent individuals. The second step is to prevent future spread. Individuals who may have been exposed, though they may not show major symptoms, must still be managed as they could cause a threat in the future. The final step is to change group norms. Changing group norms is where the lasting effect is achieved. Workers are sent into the communities to educate the people on how to recognize, prevent, and desirably create communal immunity to the disease (Slutkin

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