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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?

"In this article, we describe examples of structural violance upon people living with HIV in the US and Rawanda. In both cases, we show that it is possible to address structural violance through structural interventions."

"Susceptabiliy to infection [by HIV/AIDs] and poor outcomes is aggrivated by social factors such as poverty, gender inequality, and raceism."

"by insisting that our services be delivered equitably, even physicians who work on the distal interventions characteristic of clinical medicine have much to contribute to reducing the toll of structural violance."

The main point of this article is to report on an altercation between a patient and members of the NYPD ESU. This article came out at a time when the topic of police brutality was hot, and based on the context i believe this article was designed to attract readership because of that.

This film is designed to have an emotional appeal. Very little scientific evidance is provided, and most of what we see are images and naratives about the effects of ebola from the public's perspective. Powerful images and stories, such as the death of a pregnant women on the side of the road, the closing of hospitals, and the turning away of patients are predominantly displayed. Much of this movie is told from the perspective of a student of the University of Wisconsin, and there was a large amount of dialouge about how he tried to get his family out of the effected zone. The only notable statistics given in the film was at the end, when the number of effected and the number of deaths were compared. 

This report outlines specified services and payment rates for these services to be performed by community paramedics. The contents of this report are the result of extensive research and consultation with a workgroup conveined by the DHS consisting of representatives of emergency medical service providers, physicians, public health nurses, community health workers, and local public health agencies.

1. “A series of factors – demographic changes, economic development, global travel and commerce, and conflict – ‘have heightened the risk of disease outbreaks,’ ranging from emerging infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and drug resistant tuberculosis to food borne pathogens and bioterrorist attacks.”

2. “Although there is a great sense of urgency to address contemporary biosecurity problems— and while impressive resources have been mobilized to do so — there is no consensus about how to conceptualize these threats, nor about what the most appropriate measures are to deal with them.”

3. “There is no such thing as being “too secure.” Living with risk, by contrast, acknowledges a more complex calculus. It requires new forms of political and ethical reasoning that take into account questions that are often only implicit in discussions of biosecurity interventions.” 

“A six­month examination by The Times found that the rescuers' ability to save themselves and others was hobbled by technical difficulties, a history of tribal feuding and management lapses that have been part of the emergency response culture in New York City and other regions for years.”

''It's a disgrace,'' he said. ''The police are talking to each other. It's a no­brainer: Get us what they're using. We send people to the moon, and you mean to tell me a firefighter can't talk to a guy two floors above him?''

The article supports its arguments in two main ways, by providing statistics and case stories. Statistics pertaining to medical based residence applications are separated by location, rationale, and department they were processed by in order to demonstrate varied acceptance rates. Case stories are used to show the process, the hurdles faced by applicants, and the effect that this policy has on the health of applicants.

According to Google Scholar, this study has been cited 21 times in various papers on the topics of mental health in the face of disaster and studies on domestic violance.