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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 reference section of this article tells us about the type and number of sources that information from this article was drawn from. This article's research was drawn from a mix of online and print sources, consisting of international policy, agency reports, previous peer reviewed research articles, and news reports.

This film suggests that physicians should learn to honor and accept that they need to assist terminal patients to accieve their last desires in whatever time they have. It suggests that doctors could learn alot from palliative care practitioners in how they help patients accept their fate and assist them through the dieing process.

Data for this article was gathered from previous studies done by health organizations in Boston, Baltimore, Hati, and Rawanda. He also references peer reviewed publications for more background information, and recent work by the PIH in Rawanda.

The players featured in this article were the following:

The emotionally disturbed patient who was punched multiple times in the face by the cops from the NYPD and ESU

The NYPD 67th precinct: New York Police Department Brooklyn Precinct, four members, including members from the elite Emergency Service Unit, were accused of roughing a combative patient.

FDNY and FDNY EMS: Fire Department, City of New York and their respective EMS branch. The report was filed by members of FDNY EMS who were treating the patient when they were roughed by PD.

The stakeholders discribed in the film was the general population of Liberia. They had shared experiances of seeing the effects of ebola, innitially being in denial of its severity, then finally seeing the entire liberian public health system be overwhelmed and fail by an apparently unstopable and horrifying disease. The people effected needed to make difficult decisions about how to avoid contracting the disease, how to protect their families, and how to deal with the emotional strain placed on them by the epidemic.

The DHS embarked on the process of researching, collecting, and compiling data for this report durring the summer and fall of 2011.

The arguments of this article are supported by the following discussions:

1. The authors discuss changes in response and preparation policies for both public health and private organizations, domestically and internationally.
2. The authors discuss the importance of innovation in scientific research and development and how they have affected the way response and preparation to health crises are conducted
3. The authors provide specific aspects of international health emergencies and cite ways in which countries or organizations have dealt with them in the past and in what ways they succeeded and failed. 

The author of this article drew on first hand accounts of the WTC attacks from fire, police, and EMS personel, as well as witnesses to reconstruct the events that transpired on the morning of 9/11/01 with regards to the response. The author also conducted and cited interviews with high ranking active and retired members of the Police and Fire Departments, such as FDNY Chiefs and officers and NYPD Commissioners. Based on this, the author examines specific shortcomings, such as lack of coordination between Fire and Police, comminication barriers, and the overwhelming and uncoordinated response by both on and off-duty firefighters.

To help the government with air pollution, people can try to use their cars less. This can be done through walking, biking, or carpooling to their destinations. This will help lessen the usage of fossil fuels that decrease the air quality. Although this may not seem like much, if more and more people begin to do this, eventually the results will begin to show