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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?

The argument of this paper is supported through the field research of the author and the findings based off that, as well as testimony and interviews from those effected by the disaster. The author also discusses Chernobyl in depth in terms of pre and post disaster, as well as its history and how there was a change in the area after the disaster. There are also statistical analyses and data provided and a detailed assessment of the internal mechanisms of the government and social aspects of the topic. 

The author is Sonja D. Schmid, who is a professor in STS at Virginia Tech. Her main topic of study and research focus is the Soviet Union and nuclear emergency response. She analyzes nuclear industry risks and policies in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. She researches the organizational history of nuclear industries including their policies and advances in technology. She's also a well published author on the topic.

The purpose of this program is to help instill into nurses, doctors, social workers and more with the ability to mix their clinical practice with the ability to interpret, recognize and be moved by stories of illness according to their mission statement. This program is for those that want to improve the effectiveness of their care by increasing their familiarity with the skill of narrative medicine. 

The authors include Paul E Farmer, Bruce Nizeye, Sara Stulac, Salmaan Keshavjee. Paul Farmer is a physician and anthropologist that is very active on this subject and has many different publications on the matter. Paul and the other authors are all involved with Partners in Health. All authors are doctors and very active in global health and efforts. Partners in Health focuses on developing healthcare in countries of need.  

I further researched narrative medicine and  to see how widely it is applied to medical fields today. I also researched the areas in the Middle East that were discussed int eh chapter and read about their customs and traditions to further my understanding of how it may influence their actions medically. I also read other parts of the book in order to gain more information on the topic in general. 

A recent article was published about the technologies that the American Red Cross relies on and offers. Red Cross offers a free mobile app that provides lifesaving information on anyones phone who wants and needs it. Many volunteers utilize this information to be able to respond on scene when necessary. Their national shelter system and home fire geographic information system also helps them map out the best escape routes and prevention methods utilizing technology as well as providing them with fast response alarm times. The American Red Cross also depends on other organizations as well as technologies to help transport people, volunteers, medicine, etc to areas in need. They also depend on other organizations for response orders and collaboration of technologies, resource, hospitals and knowledge.