Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class
LuisaReisCastroAs 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_1473542806
Alexi Martin"Pioneers of modern public health during the 19th century, such as Fudolf Vichaw, understood that epidemic dieases and dismal life expentencies were tightly linked to social conditions."
"The results registered a few years later were dramatic:racial, gender, injection-drug use and socioeconmic dispute in outcomes largely disappeared within the study population."
"The idea of structure violence is linked very closely to social injustice and the monarcy of opressions."
pece_annotation_1480634592
Alexi MartinEmergency reponse is dicussed in this article through analyzing what approaches should be taken to treat victims of rape
pece_annotation_1474078105
Alexi Martin“World health is indivisible [and] we cannot satisfy our most parochial needs with attending to the health conditions of the whole globe”
“Viral pathogenicity is a property of not a virus in hibernation, but of an interaction between the virus and the “host” that is human beings.”
“Who should lead the fight against disease? Who should pay for it? And what are the best strategies and tactics to adopt?”
pece_annotation_1480831857
Alexi MartinThe main author Fughammer has areas of expertise in economics, politcal science and global health, he is a research fellow at Stockholm international peace institute. The other authors listed have expertise in healthcare and come from various research instituions. A variety of knowledge indicates a variety of perspectives on the subject.
pece_annotation_1474842014
Alexi MartinThe main arguments presented in this article is the history of disasters in the United States and the cause of buildings’ demise due to structural discrepancies. The historical accounts of the burning of the capital and the Iroquois theatre fire show how disaster investigation started and then evolved to the investigation of 9/11.
pece_annotation_1475187423
Alexi MartinThey rely on the internet, videos, blogs and first hand accounts in order to spread awareness.
pece_annotation_1475881763
Alexi MartinThe methods, tools and data used to produce the claims in the article include: creating an argument- having separate sections of the paper: a cause, an effect and the resounding outcome. The authors created a story through describing the horrible accounts of what happened during and after Katrina. The cause is the hurricane which caused displacement of most of the population due to the flooding from the broken levee. This caused the government to hire outside resources to house and “collect” citizens. This ultimately caused rent to increase,=, and pushed the poor out of New Orleans. Through developing a solid argument; the paper gains credibility. The claims were also supported through direct quotes and government statistics.
pece_annotation_1476239189
Alexi MartinThe development of the system was funded by IBM, capital factory, telemental health institute, health wildcatters.