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As a researcher, I’m interested in the political, ecological, and cultural debates around mosquito-borne diseases and the solutions proposed to mitigate them.

When we received the task, my first impulse was to investigate about the contemporary effects of anthropogenic climate change in mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans. But I was afraid to make the same mistake that I did in my PhD research. I wrote my PhD proposal while based in the US, more specifically in New England, during the Zika epidemic, and proposed to understand how scientists were studying ecological climate change and mosquitoes in Brazil. However, once I arrived in the country the political climate was a much more pressing issue, with the dismantling of health and scientific institutions.

Thus, after our meeting yesterday, and Jason Ludwig’s reminder that the theme of our Field Campus is the plantation, I decided to focus on how it related to mosquitoes in New Orleans.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito and the yellow fever virus it can transmit are imbricated in the violent histories of settler-colonialism and slavery that define the plantation economy. The mosquito and the virus arrived in the Americas in the same ships that brought enslaved peoples from Africa. The city of New Orleans had its first yellow fever epidemic in 1796, with frequent epidemics happening between 1817 and 1905. What caused New Orleans to be the “City of the Dead,” as Kristin Gupta has indicated, was yellow fever. However, as historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby points out, the slave trade cannot explain alone the spread and persistance of the disease in the region: "Alterations to the landscape, combined with demographic changes resulting from the rise of sugar production, slavery, and urban growth all contributed to the region’s development as a yellow fever zone." For example, sugar cultivation created ideal conditions for mosquito proliferation because of the extensive landscape alteration and ecological instabilities, including heavy deforestation and the construction of drainage ditches and canals.

Historian Kathryn Olivarius examines how for whites "acclimatization" to the disease played a role in hierarchies with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people and how for black enslaved people "who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their white owners, strengthening the set of racialized assumptions about the black body bolstering racial slavery."

As I continue to think through these topics, I wonder how both the historical materialities of the plantation and the contemporary anthropogenic changes might be influencing mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans nowadays? And more, how the regions’ histories of race and class might still be shaping the effects of these diseases and how debates about them are framed?

I could not find any data or reports on their website that have been collected to support their approach to healthcare other than the legislation previously mentioned.

The author is Sonja D. Schmid who is a professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. Her area of expertise is the social aspect of science and technology, esp. during the Cold War, as well as science and technology policy, science and democracy, qualitative studies of risk, energy policy, and nuclear emergency response. As a professor and researcher she has does relevant studies on Fukushima and nuclear disasters relevant to the DSTS network. One such article titled "The unbearable ambiguity of knowing: making sense of Fukushima" is cited below:

Schmid, Sonja D. "The Unbearable Ambiguity of Knowing: Making Sense of Fukushima." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. N.p., 2013. Web.

The program targets students with global skills, interdisciplinary skills, and management skills, with the goal of developing global leaders.

This report is written following an apparent “failure” in the disaster response following the 2010 Haiti earthquake

This policy directly affects first responders and technical professionals as they will be the ones interacting with patients and following the protocols outlined in this plan. First responders are required to recognize and report suspected ebola incidents, use appropriate PPE, and transport to appropriate facilities if feasible.

Three quotes that support this are

“Numerous case studies have document that meaningfully engaging lay communities in decisions traditionally made by scientific and technical elites can enable greater vigilance and raise confidence about individual emergency prepardeness.” (Schmid 196)

“So far, the nuclear industry has almost exclusively focused on accident prevention.” … “nuclear emergency preparedness and response has hardly gained traction.” (Schmid 200)

“They created an organization, Spetsatom” … “and with defining generalizable strategies about how to respond to a possible future nuclear emergency” (Schmid 200)

One of the main arguments in this publication is that the spread of illness is often determined by social forces. For example, impoverished individuals may be more susceptible to illness because they cannot afford the proper treatment, not because they are more likely to contract the illness. This is described as structural violence: socio-structural factors that prevent people from achieving their full potential, e.g. receiving medical care.