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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?

Not much, to be honest. I was disappointed they didn't mention fire fighters much in it though.

This chapter was produce by following the issue of illness of undocumented citizens over the course of several decades, and examining the relationship between how they are treated and social and economic changes. It is linked into changes in policy, memorandums and individual opinions.

The stories had video with both the storytellers and pictures from them. It also includes videos of the storm and it's effects upon the communities.

Mental health and how a community can handle the aftermath with more than physical support.

PTSD and it's effects upon life of an individual.

FEMA Trailers

I could barely find anything on this in particular. In general, there have been more and more support for a stronger mental health system in the United States and while this policy furthers development, some people believe that there is much more that is needed.

It allows for first responders to be able to respond to bio and chem hazards without delay. A simulation they ran of a hazmat response resulted in all patients dying because of a delay in response, and they believe this could happen in a real disaster as well if not for this policy.

"Entergy Corp, which operates Indian Point, said that 10 miles 'provides a robust safety margin' and the Fukushima advisory reflected that area's bigger power complex and the lack of information surrounding that accident."
"...Disaster Accountability Project, a nonprofit organization that monitors disaster-response programs and the author of the report, cited the commission's response to the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, in which it reccommended that U.S. citizens within 50 miles evacuate."

This article mainly addressed improving the way research is done and published in the realms of psychiatry. The author communicates the value and use of clinical vignettes, saying that randomized trials and standard data collecting do not tell the full story in psychological medicine, and vignettes and anecdotes fill otherwise empty gaps. Overall, the addition of story-telling to research helps solidify researchers’ and physicians’ understanding and communication about mental illness