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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?

This article used data from Baltimore about AIDS care, and the authors' research in Rwanda, discussing results from the Partners in Health structural interventions and comparing them to produce their claims. 

The article cites other reports, experts in various fields, and notes historical events (previous epidemics, disease outbreaks, bioterrorism) to support its arguments for biosecurity. 

The program is part of the SUNY system located at the University at Albany.

"The impaired body, the body unable to produce, was socially illegitimate, then."

"By analogy with the therapeutic mesasures applied at the end of life for patients suffering from illness deemed incurable, we can describe the measures and procedures devised to allow foreign patients without residence rights to stay in France, receive treatment, and have their living costs paid, as a compassion protocol."

"The logic of state sovereignty in the control of immigration clearly prevailed over the universality of the principle of the right to life. The compassion protocol had met its limit."

The narrative is sustained through Atul Gawande's experience and research into improving his end-of-life care for his own patients by meeting with other healthcare professionals (oncologists, palliative care experts and surgeons), and analyzing his actions with his father. The film has strong emotional appeal, as loss of loved ones is a common experience, and difficult for all parties involved. 

Scientific info isn't really in depth (disease processes aren't talked about) mostly just psycho-social aspects discussed.