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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?

"The violence broke out when the patient spit at the Emergency Service Unit officers and swore at them. The officers responded by hitting him in the face, hauling him off the stretcher to the ground and then tossing him back on the stretcher, the EMTs said in written statements submitted to the FDNY."

"An FDNY spokesman confirmed there was a notification from the agency to the NYPD. The NYPD said the 67th Precinct incident is being investigated by the Internal Affairs Bureau."

It was a new way of addressing disaster in 1971 when it was founded. 

“It’s simple really: go where the patients are. It seems obvious, but at the time it was a revolutionary concept because borders got in the way. It’s no coincidence that we called it ‘Médecins Sans Frontières.’”

There were many personal interviews along with overall analysis of the system through history of the industry and related companies. He combined both personal subjective experience and objective events to strengthen his arguement.

This article covers the investigation procedure following a tragedy, and how the outcomes of these investigations tend to be muddled due to factors outside of logic and reason. These influencing factors make it difficult to draw conclusions as to what contributing factors were most significant in the damage sustained during the tragedy, and how to best avoid them in the future. For this reason, it addresses how difficult it is to improve disaster-response when so little useful information can be gleaned from the modern investigatory procedure. 

The program's advocacy targets the public, health providers, and policy makers in order to enact real change in the system. It is designed to educate others on prisoners and their issues within the prison system.

They use aggregated interviews wherein all or many of the survivors repeat the same issues with long term effects of the disaster.

They also study the socioeconomic longterm effects of the disaster by comparing New Orleans years later to the past, showing how permanent an effect the storm had despite eventual recovery.

They also used sociological surveys that showed widespread mental health disorders that developed throughout the survivor population in greater frequency than that of the normal population due to the events that occured.

The policy defines what an Institute for Mental Disorders is and and payment exclusions for those under medicaid (<21 or 22 y/o or >65 y/o).

Not particularly for this one.