Search

Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro
Annotation of
In response to

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?

pece_annotation_1474167423

joerene.aviles
Annotation of
In response to

1. Nobel Prize winner Joshua Lederberg noted the connections between global inequality and threats to U.S. health security: “World health is indivisible, [and] we cannot satisfy our most parochial needs without attending to the health conditions of all the globe.”

2.Erin Koch (chapter 5) describes the implementation of a TB-control program called DOTS (for “Directly-Observed Treatment, Short-Course”) in post-Soviet Georgia.

3. the problem of maintaining quality control over global food and drug production chains, as indicated by recent scandals over the regulation of ingredients for pet food, toothpaste, or blood thinner that are imported from China.

pece_annotation_1479072741

joerene.aviles
Annotation of
In response to

1. Narrative is a form in which experience is represented and recounted, in which events are presented as having a meaningful and coherent order, in which activities and events are described along with the experiences associated with them and the significance that lends them their sense for the persons involved.

2. our own responses themselves are culturally grounded, embedded in quite a different structure of aesthetic or emotional response than that of the members of society being described.

3. They were deeply committed to portraying a "subjunctive world", one in which healing was an open possibility, even if miracles were necessary.

4. Disease as represented in biomedicine is localized in the body, in discrete sites or physiological processes. The narratives of those who are subjects of suffering represents illness, by contrast, as present in a life.

pece_annotation_1480899139

joerene.aviles
Annotation of
In response to

Private equity firms like "Warburg Pincus, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company" that invest in emergency medical services.

TransCare EMS, an EMS provider owned by the firm Patriarch Partners that served East coast states, filed for bankruptcy; had trouble paying its employees and was losing contracts with counties.

Rural/Metro, another privately owned EMS/fire provider known for lateness, suing patients, and had deteriorating patient care, and was losing contracts with counties in several states.

pece_annotation_1473630899

joerene.aviles
Annotation of
In response to

Brian Concannon (executive director) and Beatrice Lindstrom (lawyer) of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a nonprofit in Boston that fights for human rights on the island

Carrie Kahn is an international correspondent for NPR.

President Michel Martelly was the president of Haiti (from May 2011 to February 2016). 

Ban Ki-moon; the 8th and current Secretary General of the United Nations.

Jake Johnston is a researcher "of the Washington-based Center for Economic Policy and Research"