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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?

This article has been referenced in several articles, although due to the number of scientific articles written about the World Trade Center Collapse there are likely more. One such article is “Dealing with Disaster: The Politics of Catastrophe in the United States, 1789-1861”.

"The real challenge of a disaster involving nuclear facilities, however, lies in how to handle the unexpected, unpredictable, utterly novel, and barely intelligible chain of events unfolding in real time."

"...existing organizations with subject expertise have negligible international autority and often ave problematic rapport with general public, and confirm the need for a well-coordinated and integrated sociotechnical approach."

"Ellis clearly realized that a nuclear disaster response team would face tremendous challenges on the international level. He emphasized it would be necessary 'to find the sweet spot between national sovereignty and international accountability.'"

The program is funded in most part by Brown University, and research funding is suplimented by various grants applied for by individual researchers.

No bibliography is available in the PDF as the article is a published as the third chapter in a book. The bibliography of the book found online does not separate sources by chapter, however the extensive list of sources and historical aspect of the article suggests a significant amount of research into the statistics and available archived applications.

This article argues that many of the root causes of disease are based on social inequality and structural violance, citing factors such as environmental conditions, racism, pollution, housing conditions, poverty, infrastructure, and access to food, water, and healthcare. It presents the case that if clinicians take these factors into account, programs can be put into effect which, even in the poorest of rural communities, could help to mitigate disease transmission.

This article focuses on "chronic disaster syndrome," a condition that arises in the aftermath of a large scale disaster where factors from the disaster lead to perminant changes in the lives of those effected. These changes include physical and mental health crises, geographic displacement, loss of life, family, community, jobs, and property, and societal instability. The causes of these conditions are not only limited to the disaster itself but they are also by the how goverments and private sector institiutions either support recovery or put up road blocks to prevent a return to normal, perpetuating the emergency into the future. 

The main argument is supported primarily through interview segments with displaced residents from New Orleans, some of whom had returned to the city and some who had not yet been able to go home. The article also supplied descriptions of the government programs and security teams that were assigned to protect the city, which supported the claims that the government failed to properly support survivors. Finally the article included statistics as to the conditions of the communities after several years and the percent of the population that had returned, rebuilt, or was still living in trailers or temporary housing.

This group is a volunteer organization and is not a goverment program. Its disaster relief is based primarily on the desire of people to help others. The volunteers are not legally mandated to help, they do it because they want to.

This article mainly discusses the major mental illnesses associated with disasters, predisposing factors for them, how they can be aquired durring a disaster or in the aftermath, and steps that can be taken to mitigate exposure and reduce risk factors for mental illnesses due to disasters.