Search

This image reminds me of how mutual aid and communities keep each other fed, and safe, and how local practices are actually best practices. My own research， although not immediatley related to the specific public health concern of COVID, will focus on Indigenous food soverignty, particularly the right and autonomy to ferment and distribute alcohol (紅糯米酒) within the Amis community, and their current fight with the local health department on declaring whether or not their alcohol is "safe" for public consumption and distribution.

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 Fukushima Effect: A New Geopolitan Terrain", edited by Richard A. Hindmarsh, Rebecca Priestley. 

The author is Byron Good, Ph.D. He is an American anthropologist and teaches medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School. His main focus is mental illness and the cultural meanings of it. He also explores patient narratives and the perspectives of non-Western medical knowledge and compareds different mental health systems. He has done research in Iran, Indonesia, and the US. He has several publications including papers, books, and editted volumes.

Brian Concannon, executive director of the Insitute of Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a nonprofit in Boston. Fights for human rights on the island of Haiti. 

Carrie Kahn, NPR. National Public Radio, news source. 

President Michel Martelly, Haitain president. 

United Nations

Nepalese soldiers - brought with them cholera to Haiti. Sent from UN.

Ban Ki-moon - U.N. Secretary-General - led plan to eradicate cholera. 

Haitain Ministries of Health and Environment - not trusted by the world to control a trust fund

Jake Johnson - Center for Economic Policy and Research - Washington 

US Government Accountability Office - pricing the cost of building new housing too high

Mission of Hope - NGO helping build houses

US Congressmen - demaing UN Secretary-General take responsibility for outbreak

US District Court Judge J. Paul Oetken - rejected class-action lawsuit that saught to compel the UN to compensate victims and fund cholera eradication

Beatrice Lindstrom - lawter at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti 

The bibliography shows that the author did extensive research and even cited herself a few times. She uses MSF reports and essays, information from the United Nations, WHO, and other experts. 

Emergency responders are portrayed in the film as being understaffed and overwhelmed by the outbreak. They show hospitals having to turn patients away due to being overwhelmed. They also show how Liberians were frustrated with this lack of communication between doctors and the patients. Nurses started dying from the disease, forcing hospitals to close. Responders had to deal with the community's denial of the disease, the lack of education, the rapid spread, and the number of patients. 

I thought every aspect of the film served a purpose and helped shape the documentary.

I looked up bioterrorism agents and cases in which they were used. I looked on the CDCs website where they discuss preparation and planning to review their protocol for bioterrorism. On the same website, I also looked at the information for first responders to bioterrorism. 

Emergency response is not really discussed in this article, since the focus is the investigation carried out after disasters have been cleared. He does mention responders at the Hague Street Explosion and the fire departments role in both that, the Iroquois Fire, and 9/11. He also mentions that had there been better fire response, the outcomes could have been different.