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Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro

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?

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a_chen

UNSCEAR is made up of a group of scientific professions of the United Nation. This report does  not serve politically or commercially. But, it is published to assist the state governments or  organisations to prevent any possible hazards as a measurement tool.

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a_chen
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The Ushahidi Ecosystem has aimed to serve people that have limited access to the world, for example, areas around (East) Africa (“hard-to-reach places”).  One of the event the platform focused on is the post-election violence in Kenya 2008, whereas people have raised their voice to the world via the handy technological tools.  

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a_chen

There are two (2) courses for this program. For age 19-40 yrs.

  1. Rehabilitation Technicians - Assistant Physiotherapists (18 months)
  2. Orthoprosthetic Technicians (2 years – 2.5 years)
  • Learnt to design and repair prostheses
  • Assist a physiotherapist etc.
  • Practical work experience in hospital and rehabilitation units (support by a tutor)
  • Learnt to face the reality situations and deal with them

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a_chen

This report had analysed the populations that been affected, then predict the possible rate of  increasing in cancer with this accident. It was found out that the radiation risks towards human  beings has not increase (maintain stable), but to the ecosystems might have short‐term effects.  With scientific method, the over dose of radioactive substances due to Fukushima nuclear  accident can be controlled and maintained in a reasonable quantity. 

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a_chen
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The users can either collect data or send data with the mobile apps or on the software their developed. In current stage the most engagement from the users are to gather submissions from the populations that need helps. In the future, users are able to submit reports and maps from their mobile apps.