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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 research the organization has done in the past year is calling for the closure of Guantanomo Bay and ensuring that the US accepts Syrian refugees. They have taken first hand accounts of individuals in both circumstances. They provide annual reports for each year of the work they have accomplished these reports are extensive and explain what human rights were taken away and what PHR has done to help.

1. “ for many people, the idea that they had to stay in a state of heightened response to the pending ‘crisis’- a state they had to already been in for over two years- produced huge anxiety and exhaustion”

“ Within two years, 4,600 of the publically subsidized housing units in New Orleans were being torn down and $1 billion was committed by HUD to town developers to create “mixed income residences; however developers were not expected or required to build one to one replacements for units lost”

“ Not surprisingly, residents and those still trying to return to New Orleans are asking the question: Where did all the Federal money go?”

The system is used by patients, providers, caregivers and hospitals.

Emergency response is not discussed much in this article. The article discusses that other basic needs like shelter, food and safety need to be established before resources for mental health can be addressed. I believe that there needs to be emergency response for mental health because if it is not treated and recognized early it can develop into a life long issue.

"She saw the illness of this group as a "struggle for power" and material resources related to the disaster."

"According to one biochemist, many of the cleanup workers recieved 6-8 times the lethal dose of radiation." "They are alive," he told me.
"They know they didn't die, but they don't know how they survived."

"Citizens, have come to depend on obtainable technologies and legal procedures to gain political regongition and admission to some form of welfare inclusion."

Very little in this film failed to convice me. The information was well thought out and put together, the resources that were in this film were vaild and cannot be refuted because they are first hand accounts. This film does shine a negative light on nuclear power, which made me a little concerned because nuclear power is not always dangerous, but other then that nothing was done sloppily or had incorrect information

" The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be  'like the real life' in the superficial sense; but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like in some central region."

" in many cases, the actors were still engaged in the story, vs a quest for a cure - in imagining alternative outcomes, evaluating the potential meanings of the past and seeking treatments"

"The diverse accounts of the illness in these narratives represnet attentative plots, a telling of the story in different ways each implying a different story of efficacy and a possiblity of an alternative ending of the story."

Three ways the argument is supported is through evidence provided from rurual Hati- supervised ART and the effects the treatment and betterment of AIDS/HIV infections in Rwanda. Also through explaining that old methods could not wotk- to look  at the population and realize its the infrastructure that is at fault.