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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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tamar.rogoszinski
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While this policy doesn't directly address public health, it does concern the rights and protection of displaced persons. They recognize the stressful situations that refugees are in and that welfare resources will be needed to help them. They discuss housing rights and rights to public education. While these might not be medical treatments, they would help with public health and are associated with overall well-being of these refugees. 

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tamar.rogoszinski
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Because this is an academy, it does have tuition and fees. They are outlined as: Tuition, per credit hour: $981. Academic Support Fee, per semester: $420. Additional Fees (mandatory):$590 -- (Student Activity: $120, Health Center: $320, Reily Center: $150). Medical Insurance, per academic year: $3,030. Assuming people don't waive the medical insurance, take 16 credit hours (as is the norm for RPI), the yearly cost is: $20,156. 

The Provost's Office provides students up to $500 for travel needed to present a poster or paper at a conference. There are other opportunities to be granted money with the purpose of travel for conferences or training opportunities. 

Other than this information, I could not find who else would fund this academy. I can assume that Tulane takes on part of the burden as well as governmental agencies in their partner countries. 

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tamar.rogoszinski
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The main point of this article is that there is a crisis in Canada regarding mental health and suicide. Specifically within the Inuit population, a group of Aboriginal People in northern Canada. This issue has been ongoing for many decades, and despite the calls for emergency and the recognition of a crisis, little work has been done to help and prevent further suicide attempts. 

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tamar.rogoszinski
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This app provides information for healthcare providers about radiological and nuclear emergencies. There is a website as well that has more data, images, and background material to supplement the app. The app has extensive information regarding patient care in the case of an emergency. They provide management algorithms, dose estimators, scarce resources triage tools, isotopes of interest, countermeasures (Rx), emergency contact information, videos, and information regarding triage. 

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tamar.rogoszinski
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The citations in this article include not only the author's own work, but also many citations by other experts in the field and data. This tells us that the author did extensive research for this article and looked to others for opinions and information, instead of just using her own ethnographic research.