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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 convention has address matters towards the state governments rather than vulnerable  populations. Although this convention might assist vulnerable populations enhance their living  quality.

The project was organized in association with Healing Hands for Haiti (HHH). The Haiti 2010 earthquake has push the need of the program since there is not enough population served in the rehabilitation field. And there is about 15% (~1.5M) people living with a disability. The program was available before the earthquake, due to the lack of physical therapists around the country, and most of them are lived aboard. It was aimed to strengthen the rehabilitation skills within the local community and disaster preparedness.

Since the design used the aluminum alloy and steel as the main materials, the product cost should not be unaffordable for emergency uses. For the design, it is definitely attainable for the imagined user in a disaster situation.

OSHA has produced a wide range of publication on hundreds of topic that relates to the safety issues. These publications are in EPUB format for publics to view. They also produce fortnightly newsletters via email and RSS feeds.  

The MSF members could get some rest if there do not attend some of the parties, even though having a party is a way of relaxing, but sleeping in some way has the same function as well.