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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?

Miriam Ticktin is an associate Anthropology professor at The New School. She graduated with a PhD from Stanford University in 2002. “Miriam works at the intersections of the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory. Her research has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity: she has been interested in what these claims tell us about universalisms and difference, about who can be a political subject, on what basis people are included and excluded from communities, and how inequalities get instituted or perpetuated in this process. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Immigration and Humanitarianism in France (UC Press, 2011), co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: the Government of Threat and Care (with Ilana Feldman, Duke UP 2010), and a founding co-editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development.” (from her profile from The New School).

There are several ways that this study can benefit technical professionals. By knowing the factors for the highest risk for communicable diseases, resources can be directed to mitigate the effects of a disaster. The more aware technical professionals are of the risks of communicable diseases, the more likely they will be able to identify when these situations are likely and prevent them from happening.

This act was a win for all individuals in EMS as no EMT, nurse, or doctor would have to send a patient in critical need away because there was no one to foot the bill. This was a horrible position that put medical workers in the position of moral culpability for policy formed by higher-ups who never had to deal with the reality of their decisions.

Emergency responders were not the main focus of the film but were portrayed as having to deal with difficult situations that they had little real control over, mostly because the state was portrayed as trying to do the right thing but making things worse. The consequences of the government fell on the emergency workers. The doctors and responders had to risk personal safety and had to deal with people not trusting them and ignoring their requests.

The purpose of the article is to underscore the difficulties and importance of post-disaster research investigation into why exactly the structural collapse of the towers happened. Dr. Knowles does this by looking into the cause, investigation, and aftermath of several historical building catastrophes in the US.   These cases have reveal how politics, public, and private entities contributed to the disasters and what tends to happen in the aftermath. In the case of the World Trade Center, Dr. Knowles identifies the main reasons for the structures failing and how other sky scrapers are susceptible to the same attack. 

1) Case studies.

2) The laws of France with regard to healthcare and non-citizens.

3)  Personal experience of medical professionals.

The main argument of the article is “Chronic disaster syndrome” stems from three problems: first the long-term effects of personal trauma, second the disruption of the smooth functioning of their way of life, and third the permanent displacement of depressed populations from the social landscape.

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