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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?

I found the part where the healthcare worker relates to the difficulty of his position most compelling and persuasive. A man on the burial team talks about some of the challenges he faced. He says that they are in denial about the disease. For example, a man’s wife died from the disease. They took the body and marked the room with the health tattoo, do not enter and barricaded the door. A health team was tasked to disinfect the building but the moment they left the husband bust the door down and went inside. He died as well. “You see the challenges? You tell people, don’t do this, they pass behind you go do it, don’t do this, they say we are eating free money, the government is lying”.

                I was probably influenced by the fact that I am a healthcare worker and while not the same situation, I can relate to his dilemma. 

Dr. Knowles points out the structural failures of the World Trade Center due to steel beams and poor fireproofing material. Dr. Knowles connects the burning of the Capitol Building in 1814, the 1850 Hague Street boiler explosion in NYC, and Chicago’s Iroquois Theater Fire of 1903 to convey the different aspects of a structural disaster. The Capital Building focused on the investigation, the importance of the sentimental value of the building, and rebuild it as well as the difficulties involved with doing so. The Hague Street Explosion investigation attempted to pinpoint the root cause of the disaster, but after thorough investigation there were many failures at many different levels which led to the ultimate failure. The Iroquois theater fire revealed issues with public policy, regulation compliance, and public perception in addition to its investigation.

1) “The logic of state soverignty in the control of migration clearly prevailed over the universality of the principle of the right to life.”

2) “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.”

3) “Precisely because he or she is illegally resident, the sick immigrant may undertake medical tests or seek treatment under a different name, so that the cost of treatment is coverd, or simply to avoid being denounced and deported.”

1)            Personal trauma: this includes not only the direct, immediate effects of the disaster but also the long-term mental and physical effects from the disaster.

2)            Way of life disrupted “disaster capitalism”: the next part of the syndrome includes business taking advantage of the situation for profits; the main case being private companies profiting off of federal funding to rebuild the homes and lives of the citizens who were affected.

3)            Displacement: the well-off are able to relocated after the disaster has ended but for those less fortunate, there permanent effects are worse, and there is little they can do to relocated to their homes and communities after the superficial aspect of the disaster have ended.

The assessments that patients take are not visible to the public so I can not elaborate on it. This is what is quoted from the company’s website about the “Easy Clinical Screenings”:

“Patients take digital, gamified mental health assessments conveniently on their mobile device to learn their actual diagnosis and become more self aware. Providers can deploy customized assessment questions specific to each patient. Patients can see their charted progress over time. Assessments are reimbursable by insurers.”

1) The effects from the initial accident are recounted from the past history.

2) The healthcare system that deals with treating these patients are investigated.

3) The politics revolving around the first and second arguments form the third way that the author supports their argument.

1)  “Mismanagement was not the only charge mounted against the Japanese Utility that operated the reactors at Fukushima Diichi, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). In the aftermath of the disaster, international media charged workers at the plant, alternatingly, with a lack of expertise to handle the situation adequately, and with a lack of courage, when they retreated temporarily under the threat of dangerously high radiation levels.”

                2) “But emergency preparedness is hardly ever considered ‘good enough’ in retrospect, especially after a disaster in which so many lives were lost or shattered.”

                3) “Within the nuclear industry, an almost exclusive emphasis on accident avoidance has given way to a new strategy of accident preparedness and response.”

The author conducted his research by personal experience and reference to case examples.