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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?

Professionals can use this information of affected individuals in order to designate their post event focus on care for emergency providers. 

- "The importance of the body is basically nothing more than the importance of the body... as labor."

- "The immigrant's body was entirely legitimized through its function as an instrument of production, the performance of which was interrupted by illness or accident."

- “legal protection for sick people was still considerably reduced by a decision of the European court of human rights… a Ugandan woman suffering from an advanced stage of AIDS. The court refused the women’s appeal [to stay in Britain for medical reasons] and authorized her deportation."

This article focuses on the effects on mental health that a major disaster can cause. It looks at the severity of the disaster, preperation for such disatsers, treament of disaster influenced mental disorders. It includes a detailed look at the research into such.  

The largest event that affects this organization was the Cold War, becuase it was the reason that it was formed in 1980. The organization cites the first principal of the medical profession — that doctors have an obligation to prevent what they cannot treat. The website states that experts come together to explain the medical and scientific facts about nuclear war to policy makers and to the public, and to advocate for the elimination of nuclear weapons from the world’s arsenals. 

I feel the movie best adresses and audience of problem solvers and legistlaors. It offers up a HUGE problem, adressing it from both sides, as to give as much information as possible. It seems to leave it off in a situation where we either need to reconfigure emergency rooms, or figure out good legistlation to correct the poblem at the core.

Data isn't displayed as the data collected is audio recording. 

"The goal is to instill into doctors, nurses, PAs, social workers, etc, the idea of incorporating narrative medicine into their clinical work. Those predisposed to healthcare fields are likely optimal candidates for this program."

Emergency responders in this were mostly in charge of the inhabinants in the surrounding communities, as many of the scenes were considered too unsafe for normal "emergency responders". 

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