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Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro
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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?

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joerene.aviles
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Bruze Nizeye and Sara Stulac both work with Partners in Health (founded by Paul Farmer) while Salmaan Keshavjee is a physician and researcher whose expertise is in multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and global health. Farmer's and Keshavjee's anthropological research in particular is important to emergency response because it would allow for improved preparation of treatment to those communities. Their work in seeing the social causes of health epidemics would also allow for better prevention of disasters. 

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joerene.aviles
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1. Multi-drug resistant HIV and impact to treatments and research

2. Rudolph Virchow and his work in public health

3. "In the two rural districts of Rwanda in which the PIH model was introduced in May 2005, an estimated 60 percent of inhabitants are refugees, returning exiles, or recent settlers; not a single physician was present to serve 350,000 people." -looked up how this came to be; was there any healthcare available to them at all?

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joerene.aviles

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joerene.aviles
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The author is Didier Fassin, a French sociologist and anthropologist who was trained as a physician in internal medicine. He developed the field of critical moral anthropology and currently does research on punishment, asylum, and inequality. This research looks at the social and political forces that affect public health trends, so is not directly involved in emergency response.

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joerene.aviles
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1. In this sense, gender-based violence makes it clear that the suffering body – while purportedly universal – requires certain political, historical and cultural attributes to render it visible and worthy of care.

2. It seems that humanitarianism, as universalism, both erases and depends on difference; on the one hand, it manages difference, declawing it so that it doesn’t tear apart the humanitarian kit, made to fit and rehabilitate everyone into a basic bare-bones humanity.

3. In this sense, bringing gender-based violence into the humanitarian mission has inadvertently opened up a space for confrontation with politically significant forms of difference and inequality in their real and rabid forms.

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joerene.aviles
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Emergency response isn't explicitly addressed in the article, but in order to incorporate structural interventions into public health, emergency response would have to be improved as well. As the article states, there are many "diseases of poverty" and medical emergencies would be more common in those populations. Noting these trends can streamline medical response and help with providing education/ resources to prevent emergencies.