[Themaintainers] Maintaining the Last of the Iron Lungs

[Emma Humphries]

Hi Maintainers,

I just read this piece on Gizmodo about three of the surviving iron lung
users (all of whom contracted polio before Salk's vaccine) in the US. 

https://gizmodo.com/the-last-of-the-iron-lungs-1819079169

There's a bunch of interesting things in here:

* All of these survivors have had the fortune to find people interested
in helping maintain the devices, and rebuild devices out of spares and
irreparable devices. 

* All the survivors the writer found were white, so that raises
questions about how race affects long term polio survivors.

* Through a cascade of mergers and history, the company responsible for
the machines is Philips Respironics unit (the CPAP manufacturer.) How to
maintain and build spares for the machines (and components like the
collar that seals the user in from the neck down are expendables) has
not survived the mergers.

* The stakes around maintenance are life and death. If you can't find a
spare part, you could die.

I read this and had to share with the list. 

To introduce myself, I'm Emma and I'm not an academic. 

I'm a program manager at Mozilla, with the title of "Bugmaster." It's a
role that combines project management, data analysis, process design,
and historian-ship. Our bug tracker, Bugzilla, has been around since the
late 1990s (before Netscape morphed into Mozilla.) 

I'm enjoying the conversations here and your reading recommendations are
stacking up on my shelves at home!

Emma Humphries
ech at emmah.net || emma at mozilla.com