Search

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 Red Cross is primarily funded by donations and the government offers some support. 

The article uses the historical background of Chernobyl to establish government policies, the analysis of policies pertaining to the healthcare system available to affected population, and narratives of those directly affected by Chernobyl related illnesses. 

The data is mainly visualized in a report form. 

The main point of the article is to show the ethical and enviromental danger inmates face on Riker Island. This is supported by the description heat emergencies that are risking lives of inmates, air pollution in the facility due to methane gas that is being produced by the landfill it was built on, and the shifting in the ground that is leading to cracking, subjecting facilities to flooding during extreme weather.

Emergency response is one of the main ideas of this article. Schmid expresses the importance of emergency response to nuclear disaster in that prevention can only go so far and in the specific case of nuclear disaster the cause is often unpredictable and unavoidable (natural cause ie. Hurricanes, tsunami). Without an appropriate emergency response system in place nuclear disasters will continue to cause significant environmental damages, infrastructure damages, and harm citizens. 

This article is referenced in various other papers concerning cultural factors in patient treatment. 

Paul Farmer is an American physician and anthropologist who is known for providing appropriate healthcare in under developed regions and developing countries. Farmer is situated in emergency response in that he is a physician providing care to those in need and works toward ensuring that people will have access to healthcare despite socioeconomic conditions. Bruce Nizeye works alongside Farmer and specializes in TB infection control in Rwanda. Sara Stulac is a physician who specializes in women’s and children’s healthcare. Her focus has included pediatric HIV prevention and treatment, malnutrition care, inpatient pediatrics and neonatology, and pediatric oncology and other non-communicable disease treatment. Salmaan Keshavjee is a physician who specializes in multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and in providing access to healthcare in poverty stricken regions. 

Ludvig Foghammar is a research fellow at Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPI) and specializes in economics, politcal science, and global health. 

Suyoun Jang, a researcher at SIPI studies the fragile states of, security, and developement of Korean Culture.

This article claims that after the disaster and initial relief efforts Haiti has not changed for the better and is "back more or less to normal." However many Haitians are suffering from cholera after a water polution mishap with the United Nations initial relief efforts.