Search

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 authors received no special funding for this article.

I found it cited in Documenting attacks on health workers and facilities in armed conflicts, otherwise no where else.

This study utilized a random sample of rape victim advocates to determine whether the current community systems and services work for these victims. As is mentioned in the introduction, the services for rape victims are typically separated in terms of legal, medical, mental health; studies tend to focus on these entities individually when evaluating their procedures, thus greatly narrowing the scope of the procedure. This study, therefore, aims to create a comprehensive view of the system as a whole and whether services provided to victims work in this larger context.

They analyzed reports, policies, and the history of health response systems in order to come to their conclusions.

The report comes within a much larger book edited by Richard Hindmarsh focused on the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The book as whole explores social, environmental, and political issues in the aftermath of the incident. It appears to be available at multiple collegiate libraries including Boston College, Williams College, Harvard University, MIT, and Cornell University.

This organization seeks to provide emergency medical services to community members of Bed-Stuy, an area seeing disproportionate levels of physical violence and trauma. Before BSVAC the average ambulatory response time to the city was approximately 30 minutes, gravely eating into the "Golden hour" trauma patients are allowed. In light of this, two EMS workers chose to start a volunteer EMS agency to provide emergency care to the city, expose community members to careers in EMS, and teach BLS skills to residents. 

Investigation after large-scale national tragedy is often contaminated with the many factors that surround that event. Since the attack on the World Trade Center was so deeply rooted in politics, culture, international relations and emotional connections, the investigation following the attacks failed to result in a dispassionate, scientific verdict. Instead, it became muddled in the many conflicting and intertwining interests that came with the attack. 

The report quite clearly details the need to change our approaches to healthcare and epidemic emergencies. Currently, we seem to address these events in a singular method, and are unwilling to alter this approach. This is partially due to the narrow scope of patient care; for the most part, administering care to patients follows a standard guideline that does not seek to reach beyond that singular case. It is beyond the scope of a practitioner to attempt to mitigate socioeconomic discrepancies within their clinics alone. However, as Farmer and his colleagues argue, broadening this standard is necessary to combat illness. Biosocial factors, not just medicinal factors, need to be tackled in order to fully combat disease.

At present time, PubMed only has 1 entry for reports/articles citing this research. It is put forth by another group discussing documentation of health care worker attacks during armed conflicts.