Search

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 study looks at the physical and mental health profiles of prisoners, and incarceration as both a health risk and health opportunity. This seems like a new way of studying the issue, as I've heard of studies only looking at the race of prisoners in the U.S. 

Ethnographic research, archival and field work in the affected countries over several years, data cited from other research articles, and collaborated with scientists in atomic energy/ radiation.

The main findings of the article are the narratives of the people suffering from epilepsy can follow common "plots"; they have a starting point, cause, and the ongoing struggle with their condition and looking for a treatment/ cure. The narratives are given by the subjects, and can be interpreted differently by each reader. The actual patient experience of illness is subjective and can have social, cultural, and religious aspects tied to them.

The article addresses the public health inequities caused by for-profit ambulance agencies, which can put low-income families in a worse situation when they bill outrageously and/or sue their patients after sometimes providing sub-par or negligent treatment. Also shows the poor examples of emergency response when first responders are delayed due to understaffing or don't have the drugs/ equipment to adequately treat patients ("hospital shopping" done by desparate ambulance agencies). 

Looking on Google, this article has been referenced by a University of Washington anthropology professor (http://www.washington.edu/omad/ctcenter/projects-common-book/mountains-…) and in the book "Viral Mothers: Breastfeeding in the Age of HIV/AIDS".

The report was published by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an independent, international medical humanitarian organization. They provide aid and high quality medical care to populations in locations of conflict, disease outbreak, and natural disasters. 

The program provides an undergraduate degree or graduate certificate.

The article describes the situation in post-Katrina New Orleans as one where trauma is constantly happening and more work is going into emergency response than recovery. Instead of construction workers, social workers and the like, the military was sent by the government for aid after Katrina. 

The main findings in this article is the phenomenon of "biological citizenship" that occurred in the Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster, how "scientific cooperation and political management" developed, and how sociopolitical factors affect the course of health and disease in a country.