C-Urge project is a doctoral network set up to research and better understand the complexity of climate and enviromental change, that is happening on global, as well as on a local scale.
Through various research approaches set in various countries, we aim to highlight the notion of urgency and need to enrich the debate around the topic of environemtal change, that is both fast, and subtle and poses a serious challenge for the future.
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?
Live Box is designed for emergency, therefore there should not be any skill or training for using the product. The product should be easy to use and universal.
The film portrayed the far-flung MSF experience offer people who suffered in Democratic Republic of Congo and post-conflict Liberia. They have to make decisions of who going to save because of the limited resource. Besides, they have to balance and fixed their own mentality when watching amount people dying every-day. Kiara Lepora who was the Emergency Coordinator in the mission, have mentioned that Liberia is like a big car accident, but they might cannot do something for help the people. She thought she could do well before arriving, and she said was not in to aftermath. I think they are all doing their best for helping people in the mission, and the problem is they are not as individual, they cannot stay there forever. They need to balance the thinking that they are work as a team as MSF, and it will keep going forward.
American Red Cross is an organization aim to provide help and care to those in need. For example, supporting for disaster, blood donation and so on. There are sever main areas within, the Disaster relief, America’s Military Families supporting, lifesaving blood, health and safety services and International services.
The mental health is a crisis and the response is not enough for supporting. Many examples and narrative are shows the situations. Every single person have affected by the suicide and the problem was worse and worse. There were many reports about the issue but just little action for solving the problem.
The article not really address the public health inequities. However, Dr Kramer considered that combine the case vignette and storytelling can help doctor’s judgement, especially in the area of psychiatric.
The value of the ethic to officers could be leading and influence by some propaganda and other methods.
The publisher is Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement. The article is initial contribution by Jean-Marc Biquet and refer to Andrea Binder.