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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?

OSHA issues workplace health and safety regulations. These regulations include limits on hazardous chemical exposure, employee access to hazard information, requirements for the use of personal protective equipment, and requirements to prevent falls and hazards from operating dangerous equipment.

For example, OSHA released information regarding Zika and how employers can guarantee safety and protection for their workers. They also provide standards for PPE and decontamination as well as safety. They've released many standards and protocols discussing this. 

This policy applies to any persons who are considered refugees. Because this was after the Second World War, it was at first limited to people fleeing within Europe. Since then, its scope has widened and applies to people fleeing persecution and can be used today with respect to the current refugee problem. 

1. I looked into the currently immigration and visa laws in France and found that when it comes to people seeking asylum, French law recognizes rights to asylum or political refugee status for a foreign-born person. They also use the rules of the Geneva Convention to come to this conclusion.
2. I looked at a comparison of Obamacare and the French health system. One aspect of the French healthcare system that would be relevant to currently public health issues in the US (ie, epipen costs) is the presence of an organization called the CNAMTS that monitor spending for services across the country. This organization can reduce the price of a drug or service (if it recognizes that the spending for it is too high) in order to make it more accessible.
3. I researched how France is dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis. Despite terrorist attacks that have occurred in France due to members of the Syria-and-Iraq-based terror group ISIL, the French president promised to take in 30,000 refugees by 2017.

With a very long bibliography, it can be assumed that a lot of research was put into this paper in order to strengthen the argument. The authors clearly did a lot of research, citing not only governmental sources, but other researchers as well. Variety in the articles present in the bibliography can be seen.

1. comorbidity and examples of them. 
2. Mental illness among first responders
3. WHO's information regarding mental health, poverty, and development and vulnerable populations

1. "The sufferers and their administrators were also supported by the nonsuffering citizens, who paid a 12 percent tax on their salaries to support compensations"
2. "Today, approximately 8.9 percent of Ukraine is considered contaminated."
3. "When I returned in 2000 to Kyiv to conduct further research, I discovered that cur- rent democratic politicians, many of whom drafted the original compensation laws as sovereignty-minded nationalists, now saw the Cherobyl compensation system as a dire mistake that has "accidentally" reproduced a socialist-like population."
4. "Specific cases illustrate how these economic and state processes, combined with the technical dynamics already described, have laid the groundwork for such "counter- politics."29 Citizens have come to depend on obtainable technologies and legal proce- dures to gain political recognition and admission to some form of welfare inclusion."

The object of this study is to determine whether or not there was overdiagnosis of thyroid cancer in Fukushima dollowing the nuclear disaster in 2011. 

Dr. Good primarily used case studies and interviews to help shape the argument and show how narratives of illness are shaped by many aspects of a person's life, specifically their culture. He also used statistics and other research to analyze these interviews and create a stronger understanding.