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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?

According to Google Scholar, this study has been cited 21 times in various papers on the topics of mental health in the face of disaster and studies on domestic violance.

Research for this article was drawn mainly from other online sources such as news articles and youtube videos, and new research conducted by the author such as interviews with officials and locals in the affected areas. 

The author of this article is Adriana Petryna, who is a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focus has been on nuclear science and medicine, and it's cultural and political ramifications.

Emergency response is the primary concern of this article. The article is about the challenges faced in forming and maintaining an effective international response system for nuclear emergency response.

More information on the pathophysiology and disease paths of the terminal illnesses discussed in this film would have increased the educational value and depth of this film.

"In this article, we describe examples of structural violance upon people living with HIV in the US and Rawanda. In both cases, we show that it is possible to address structural violance through structural interventions."

"Susceptabiliy to infection [by HIV/AIDs] and poor outcomes is aggrivated by social factors such as poverty, gender inequality, and raceism."

"by insisting that our services be delivered equitably, even physicians who work on the distal interventions characteristic of clinical medicine have much to contribute to reducing the toll of structural violance."

The main point of this article is to report on an altercation between a patient and members of the NYPD ESU. This article came out at a time when the topic of police brutality was hot, and based on the context i believe this article was designed to attract readership because of that.

This film is designed to have an emotional appeal. Very little scientific evidance is provided, and most of what we see are images and naratives about the effects of ebola from the public's perspective. Powerful images and stories, such as the death of a pregnant women on the side of the road, the closing of hospitals, and the turning away of patients are predominantly displayed. Much of this movie is told from the perspective of a student of the University of Wisconsin, and there was a large amount of dialouge about how he tried to get his family out of the effected zone. The only notable statistics given in the film was at the end, when the number of effected and the number of deaths were compared. 

This report outlines specified services and payment rates for these services to be performed by community paramedics. The contents of this report are the result of extensive research and consultation with a workgroup conveined by the DHS consisting of representatives of emergency medical service providers, physicians, public health nurses, community health workers, and local public health agencies.