EiJ Concept: Equity
A critical exploration of the concept of equity.
A critical exploration of the concept of equity.
Enviornmental injustice researcher's program pages.
Digital collection of resources for understanding and using critical concepts to characterize and respond to environmental injustice.
Collections of readings that examine and conceptualize environmental injustice.
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?
The study is in the Annual Review of Public Health. This is just one journal out of many Annual Reviews; the studies/ topics published are solely related to public health, such as epidemiology, biostatistics, and health services. Health professionals use the Annual Review to look at major articles in Public Health, for research, and for teaching.
Emergency response is addressed in the "Post-Disaster: Preventing and Treating Mental Health Conditions" section, with the debriefing done by emergency responders referenced. However, critical incident stress debriefing hasn't shown to be effective in the recovery process or preventing mental health disorders. Psychological first aid (PFA) is suggested as a post-disaster intervention, but it seems like a duty for mental health care providers, not emergency responders.
Emergency responders not portrayed in the film; only medical professionals involved in long-term patient care are addressed.
The main point of the article is that private ambulance and fire department agencies have questionable policies and business practices that hurt not only patients but also their employees. It's supported with anecdotal evidence following several agencies that have filed for bankruptcy, going over incidents of lateness, understaffing, lack of supplies, and aggressive billing or lawsuits to get payments from patients.
Almost all of the references cited in the bibliography were taken from Google Scholar, implying that the authors used this database to collaborate on the article through the internet. Many of the articles cited were from Paul Farmer's own works, so he also seems like the main contributor to the article.