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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?

"History shows that, with time, a given community of engineers and scientists has generally proven able to explain the technical particulars of a structural collapse. Yet, the demands placed in an investigation have as much, or more, to do with defining the dominant investigator and quickly addressing the fears and anger of the press, government, and an outraged public than they do with discovering the defiinintive technical truths of a catastrophic event."

"Steam power...utterly transformed American economic and social life in the 19th century. With this promising technology, though, arrived a whole series of risks, catastrophic boiler explosions being the most dramatic, and the deadliest."

The entire video was very compelling.

Many studies look at intimate partner voilence (IPV), but only two previous studies look at it specifically related to a natural disaster, so this research is inventive in that way. It uses data from a larger study of the area that was hit by Katrina. The data was obtained through interviews, and in the period of time 6 months before Katrina to 6 months after, measures of psychological and physical IPV are analyzed. These measures were also compared to a scale of how stressful the individual's life had been in that time frame, which was reached based on answers to questions about how Katrina affected the individual.

" we aim to provide an overall picture of what we have learned from decades of research on the presentation, burden, correlates, and treatment of mental disorder following disasters. We also describe challenges to studyingdisaster-relatedpsychopathologyandlimitationsinourcurrentmethodologiesandoffer directions for future research."

"Childrenexposedtodisastersareparticularlyvulnerabletopsychologicalproblems,mostcommonly symptoms of anxiety (e.g., PTSD, panic, phobias) and depression but also acute stress reactionsandadjustmentdisorder(27).Elevatedvulnerabilityamongchildrenmaybeafunctionof their being less equipped to cope with what they have experienced (49)."

"Psychological first aid (PFA) has become the preferred post-disaster intervention, with three goals: Secure survivors’ safety and basic necessities (e.g., food, medical supplies, shelter), which promotes adaptive coping and problem solving; reduce acute stress by addressing post-disaster stressors and providing strategies that may limit stress reactions; and help victims obtain additional resources that may help them cope and regain feelings of control"

The argument is supported through research into political trends - the survivors gave up their own values to support anyone that could help them. There were interviews with the survivors and those living in the area - they dicussed how their lives changed, their inability to find work and their health issues that started immediately or soon after the disaster. The authors also did research of programs to help the survivors - looking at the compensation they could recieve, options for working, how to get healthcare, etc.

**Linda not Laura as I previously stated

"Two FDNY EMTs who had to intervene to stop four police officers beating a handcuffed patient on a stretcher have turned the cops in to authorities"

""Three cops began to punch the patient in the face, EMS (had) to get in the middle of it to intervene. Pt's. wounds and injuries cleaned in the (ambulance)," the report said."

I further researched the reliability of some of the funds that were donated to in the months after the disaster. The FBI issued warnings to those donating to be sure they were giving money to a reliable fund, as there was a lot of fraud taking place. With so much money being donated internationally in a short period of time, it was likely easy for such to occur, and that also took away from the amount of aid Haiti received.

I also looked into the improvements in the country over the first few years since the earthquake. The people of Haiti were cited as having a strong desire to help rebuild, they just needed to be shown how. http://www.nbc29.com/story/20596283/haiti-sees-improvements-since-earth…

I looked up the rates of hospital bankruptcy/closing, the results looked to be interesting. The article (http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/hospital-bankruptcies-result-…) makes it seem avoidable, if the warnings are taken seriously in the years leading up to the crisis. "What they found was that filing hospitals tended to be smaller, not part of a health system and were more likely to be in the Northeast or West Coast. Many factors were involved, including poor financial management, changes in payer mix, reimbursement reductions, overzealous construction and purchasing of physician practices, decrease in volume and demographic shifts that were the impetus for filing."

I also looked up ER wait time statistics, by state, over the course of several years, etc. (https://projects.propublica.org/emergency/) Very interesting!