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 article focuses on the change in the French culture in reference to their policy on the health of immigrants and what that may lead to in terms of legislature reform. The article discusses an overall change to a more "compassionate"  way in developing national laws.

This article has been referenced in various other articles and papers in regard to the socio-economic affects of disasters. 

This study looks at subjects who lived in Fukushima at the time of the nuclear disaster. Specifically those who were under the age of 20 in 2015.

For first responders and technical professionals, this policy requires them to provide the emergency care needed to the patient despite the patients ability to pay. This policy puts to the value of someone's life higher than someone's economic status. 

Personal experiences and other research articles from scholars and physicians were used to develop the arguments in this article. 

The film provides direct footage of what goes on in the waiting room. It follows the triage nurse, several patients who come in through the waiting room, and several patients who come in from the ambulance. The film also has segments with doctors and social workers. This film does not present with scientific information but more of a real life account for the viewer to observe. The emotional appeal of the film is driven by the connection the viewer develops with some of the patients and ties to any personal experiences the viewer may have with emergency rooms.