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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 authors used the healthcare developments of Boston, Haiti, and Rwanda where they have worked to provide access to healthcare. In Rwanda they provided easier access to HIV medications and trained neighbors or relatives of the patient on how to administer the treatments so they would not have to go to a clinic. They discussed a similar program that occurred in Haiti but for tuberculosis. In providing these treatments to people who previously could not afford them, they increased their life expectancies. In Rwanda they showed that in providing formula to mother with HIV or AIDs they were no longer transmitting the disease to their children. Previously the mothers could not purchase formula and the only way they could feed their babies was breast feeding. 

The arguement is supported through research findings, current facts, and interviews with those in the field. 

The main argument of this article is that “biosecurity” is not just a national security issue but a worldwide issue.  Biosecurity is effected by many things including emerging diseases, bioterrorism, food safety, and the “cutting edge of life sciences.” 

Doctors without Borders has set up their own facilities and supports their own facilities so they do not have to rely on the infrastructure of the country they are in. However, they do heavily rely on private donations so they continue to operate. 

This article address emergency response and public health in that providers are there to help patients and releive suffering and in doing that, specifically in times of crisis protocols are broken and morals come into play a little more. In this article a doctor euthanized suffering patients who may or may not have been rescued from the hospital during hurricane Katrina. 

The Red Cross targets people to help who are suffering from a disaster. 

This article used, testimonials, field research and analysis of the healthcare system and govermental policies. 

The system relies on relationships with scientific institutions, government institutions, and educational institutions.