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Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro
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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?

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joerene.aviles
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1. "as Richard Danzig has argued in the case of bioterrorism, despite the striking increase in funding for biodefense in the U.S., there is still no 'common conceptual framework' that might bring various efforts together and make it possible to assess their adequacy."

2. “Who should lead the fight against disease? Who should pay for it? And what are the best strategies and tactics to adopt?”

3. In contrast to classic public health, preparedness does not draw on statistical records of past events. Rather, it employs imaginative techniques of enactment such as scenarios, exercises, and analytical models to simulate uncertain future threats.

4. emergency response is acute, short-term, focused on alleviating what is conceived as a temporally circumscribed event; whereas “social” interventions—such as those associated with development policy—focus on transforming political-economic structures over the long term

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joerene.aviles
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The college was created to continue New York State's position as a leader in homeland security, cybersecurity and emergency preparedness and as a response to the growing need for professionals in those fields. Advances in technology, and increased threats to terrorism and cybersecurity in the past few decades called for the formation of this college. Overall it was a strategic political and economic decision by Governor Andrew Cuomo as it would provide training in a field that's expected to grow by 650,000 employees (for cybersecurity) in the next decade*.

*http://www.albany.edu/news/57214.php

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joerene.aviles
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1. There is also a need for further assessment of the impact of violence, both on facilities and organizations, and also on populations served. These knowledge gaps have serious implications for the way the drivers of violence are understood and, by extension, the ability of organizations operating in complex security environments ability to effectively manage the security of their staff and facilities in order to deliver healthcare.

2. Within medical anthropology and sociology, violence is seen a social phenomenon that is culturally structured and interpreted, and the human body can serve as a site of contestation, where various types of power relations play out at individual-, community-, state- and global-level levels.

3. In the same vein, training among health workers and patients in complex security about the importance of reporting attacks and different reporting fora may reduce the number of incidents that go unreported and the accuracy and completeness of those which are reported.