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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 argument is supported using multiple historical accounts such as the 1850 Hauge st explosion where the boiler failure investigation consisted of people who were experts on the boiler, on the man who controlled the boiler and his habits. The disaster was blamed on those who were directly involved in the boiler’s sale, upkeep and use. Next the article uses findings of the Iroquois theatre fire and puts the people who designed the building at fault. Freeman, a well educated engineer analyzed the faults of the building and deemed that many factors caused the fire. The 1814 burning of the capitol is used as evidence because the government did not want to spend the time or money to build the building properly to prevent the fire. The investigation was spearheaded by Lathrobe who attempted to rebuild in the proper way, but ultimately failed due to political reasons.

This group works in social ecologies that are mostly controlled by the government; not what may be best for the people. but what is best for the government financially. PHR works to help those who social justice or human rights have been stripped for little to no reason. This shapes the way the organization views disaster because they believe that disaster can begin with one person who is not living up to their standards of life due to someone or something else. Disaster is a comprehensive network of interlocking pieces, when one piece is out of place it is defined as a place to start.

6. Emergency response is addressed in the article because the article begs for those to help when  the event happened. While fixing the structural areas of the disaster (such as the levee) the lives and culture of the people were more important. There was little to no focus on rehousing those who were displaced.Despite that there was money specifically allocated to helping those rebuild, rehouse and/or move out of New Orleans, very little money was actually seen by those who needed it most. People also waited for days to be saved from their flooded homes. While it may be dangerous it is unethical to leave people for long periods of time. Money needs to be spent on preventing the levee from breaking again.

The system provides patient and provider sessions via video call, track daily behavior and improvement, clinical expertise, authorization to see your data, to find providers, credentialed counseling, appointments on the go, session history and patient profiles, full scheduling and provider bio, tracked progress, assessments of mental health, automated payments, systems integration, operational analytics and coordinated care.

The report’s bibliography is extensive and the report contains many direct quotes and figures. This indicates the article took a long time to put together and create- increases its credibility and use as a resource in this topic.

Emergency response is dicussed in this article through discussion of those who responded to the disaster were the ones who had the most health issues. This reponse created the new economy to support the country in lieu of a percentage of its population becoming unable to work.

The audience the film best addresses is the public who knew about the nuclear event, but were not informed to the extent of what had happened or its ramifications on the future.