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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?

Many precautions that were taken to reduce blood lead poisoning in New Jersey over the years. In 1978, lead paint was banned in America, and in 1996 New Jersey required children to be screened for blood lead levels.  However, Chris Christie vetoed legislation to remove lead paint from old housing in 2016. 

The main argument of the article is about how child poverty is induced by several factors.  She discusses the risks of child poverty to child development, some of these factors are parental stress, mental and physical illness, child hunger, and low expectations.  Lamy addresses how families can overcome poverty struggle.

In comparison to other counties, Essex county has the largest number of children above the CDC blood lead level, 5% of Essex county children are affected.  They surpassed Passaic County's 3.4%.  This risk is more prominent in Essex county than any other group in the state.

This study addresses vulnerable populations because it explains that high blood levels, which is a sign of poverty, can have an impact on performance in testing.  Even though information was not given pertaining to poverty in each subject, these conclusions can be drawn from other studies.

The article finds that because Newark's population is 75% black and Hispanic, the hiring problem has a disproportionate impact on minorities.  Blacks and Hispanics are most at risk of this issue.

The author is Cynthia E. Lamy, she is a developmental and National Institute for Early Education Research educational psychologist and research fellow at Rutgers University. 

Some vulnerabilities blacks in Newark face are health issues like blood lead poisoning because they cannot afford to solve the issue. 

This study was conducted by using testing data from 4th-grade students from North Carolina, and comparing if they matched high blood lead levels.  This method was conducted in seven counties through normal statistical methods.