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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?

Emergency response is not directly addressed in the article, but addressing the welfare of endangered citizens helps to ensure good public health. The policies formulated addressing illness in the undocumented workers speaks to the overall care given to citizens.

The user walks through the stories through their website in a timeline of each storm, where it follows each part of both storms. (i.e. Storm, Aftermath, Recovery, Future)

Emily Goldmann is a PhD and MPH (Master of Public Health) at the College of Global Public Health. She focuses on environmental and social causes of mental health and their consequences. While she doesn't focus on disasters, her studies intersect with those in which we are interested in: Global Health and causes of mental health disorders.

Sandro Galea is a physician and epidemiologist at Boston School of Public Health. He has a long list of other positions of research at other colleges as well. He focuses on how the social aspects of a community create mental disorders, particularly urban communities where mood-anxiety and substance abuse disorders are common. He has a particular focus also upon mass-trauma and disasters and how they affect the mental health of the world long term, such as 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina. He studies precisely what is relevant to the DSTS Network in these cases, where he looks at the mental health consequences instead of the physical consequences of these disasters.

It defines where we would take psych transports. Otherwise it does not directly address first responders.

it removes liability issues that could be potentially worse for lower income individuals that can interfere with patient care.