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Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro
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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?

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xiaox
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Indian Point Energy Centre is a new power plants station in Buchanan. As well as the communities around it are without any emergency respond plants to nuclear disaster. NRC is  Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is an organisation for the safety of nuclear power production and civilians uses for nuclear materials. In addtion, there are some representors of different communities. For example, Ben Smilowitz who is executive director of the Disaster Accountability Project, and Dutchess County’s commissioner of emergency response,Dana Smith. Some actors' words are quotated to show the main point of the article and support the author research. 

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xiaox
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This concept design is create a market which is within more functions and technologies for guardrail. In the existing market, there are some good design highway guardrail, such as EZY-guard smart guardrail. Most of the existing product are applied outter shapes and physical structures rather than some electrical technology. Compare to the existing products, this concept design is more challenged by the cost. 

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xiaox
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The implication that this policy have are all medically necessary health and mental health care expenses of an individual with respect to a WTC-related health condition (including necessary prescription drugs). It offers people a series of health helping and similar supports for people if there is another impacted terrorism.

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xiaox
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It used recording data for 455 married or cohabiting persons who were from 23 counties of Mississippi at the time of Hurricane. There are also a highly experience epidemiological survey team and seven local interviewers who underwent training in general techniques participated the interviews. The study was approved by an Institutional Review Board. The data was measured using the PTSD module of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder. Following the reference, it was modified in connected to the Hurricane Katrina.