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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 NYS Ebola Preparedness Plan applied to residents and those travelling to and from the State of New York. The policy affected numerous agencies including hospitals, EMS agencies, public safety departments, and transportation authorities. 

Currently, the US Department of Veterans Affairs is engaged in the initiative to prevent and end homelessness among military veterans. The DVA works with the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness and state governments on this initiative.

As part of the evidence in this article, the author cites Gerard R. and Hailey-Means who are two former inmates of Rikers' Island, Martin Horn who is a former NYC DOC commissioner, Mayor DeBlasio, John Boston of the Legal Aid Society, Kim Knowlton who is a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Susi Vassallo who is an associate professor of emergency medicine at the NYU School of Medicine, and a number of additional individuals and organizations.

• "In a place of tremendous economic desperation, people competed for work in the zone of exclusion, where salaries were relatively high and steadily paid. Prospective workers engaged in a troubling cost benefit assessment that went something like this: if I work in the zone, I lose my health. But I can send my son to law school."
• "Opinions about how the state should address the fate of these Chemobyl victims also serve as a kind of barometer of the country's changing moral fabric."
• "At stake in the Chernobyl aftermath is a distinctive postsocialist field of power-in-the-making that is using science and scientific categories to establish the state's reach. Scientists and victims are also establishing their own modes of knowledge related to injury as a means of negotiating public accountability, political power, and further state protections in the form of financial compensation and medical care."

Dr. Miriam Ticktin is an associate professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She earned her doctorate degree in anthropology in 2002 from Stanford University. She focuses her research efforts on gender, humanitarianism, and human rights.

The Burning of the US Capitol Building, 1814. From the very beginnings of its contruction, the US Capitol Building was plagued by conflict between the chief engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who desired a durable and fireproof design, and Congress, which pushed for rapid completion of the building with limited expense. The result was a mixed contruction, with parts of the building constructed to withstand a major fire and others constructed with lumber. Following the fire, Latrobe conducted a relatively thorough investigation, revealing the various points of failure and recontructing the timeline of the disaster. However, as far as the public was concerned, the disaster was the result of diplomatic and military failures, rather than any engineering failures. 

The Hague Street Explosion, 1850. Steam power was widely used in the United States, but safety protocols and standards were not widespread nor maintained by any particular agency. The exact nature and cause of the boiler explosion at Hague Street was widely debated by various experts, engineers, and laypersons. The federal government scrambled to enact new laws regarding boiler inspection and safety with little effect in reducing boiler-related disasters, while city officials instead chose to remember the disaster through a fund-raising campaign for the victims' families. 

The Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago, 1903. The disaster called into question the integrity of the building code system in the city of Chicago and caused widespread debate regarding who should be responsible for enforcing building codes. The disaster resulted in a rapid expansion of fire code and fire safety standards and the creation of a network of investigators, comprised of engineers, insurance agencies, testing labs, and fire officials. However, the pressure for such action and progress soon declined as the government, press, and public moved on from the disaster. 

This policy affects all patients, or potential patients, in the United States and further affects all hospitals and care providers. It ensures that all patients suffering from emergency medical condition(s) are provided the appropriate medical care regardless of their initial ability to pay. Furthermore, it requires that hospitals, their emergency departments, and their staff must treat and stabilize these patients prior to transferring to another facility. 

• "Chronic disaster syndrome thus refers in this analysis to the cluster of trauma-and posttrauma-related phenomena that are at once individual, social, and political and that are associated with disaster as simultaneously causative and experiential of a chronic condition of distress in relation to displacement."
• "Despite the overwhelming need for mental health services, few residents were able to access mental health support for their symptoms, simply because health care facilities and health care personnel were so scarce. Most health personnel were themselves experiencing the trauma of displacement, and few clinical facilities survived the disaster."
• "Families had to find a place to live, a way to replace lost income, a place for their children to go to school, a way to obtain their prescription medications and telephones, a way to pay mounting unpaid bills for homes they no longer inhabited. Without their personal documents, they had to try to track insurance policies, if they had them, bank accounts, and health records, to begin the slow process of accessing government or insurance funds to help pay for their displacement and their hoped-for recovery."

The Cold War was a principal motivating factor for the IPPNW who aims to abolish nuclear weapons and thereby prevent nuclear war and destruction.