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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?

The bibliography includes news articles and other articles surrounding the topics. Extensive research was clearly done with exerpts from old articles and letters used as part of the research. 

To support its arguements and produce claims, this article uses statistics from the health care system, personal testimonials, and extensive field work.

Approximately 90 percent of the American Red Cross membership is volunteer, drawing people from all ages, ethnicity, and background. These volunteers respond to nearly 70,000 disasters every year, mostly home and apartment fires. They also put on training programs and blood drives.

While I cannot find where this chapter is referenced, the themes discussed by Fassin is present in a majority of his publications and research. It has been reviewed by many anthropologists, and won an award by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, showing that it is highly recognized by professionals within this field. 

Emergency response is not addressed in this article. This article could be of interest to medical responders, however, because it helps to give insight on our patient's suffering.

With every new disaster it faces, the ARC draws much on its own research and the experiances of the Global Red Cross. Recent major domsetic disasters the ARC has faced include Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, 

Emergency response is a vital aspect of this article. The authors highlight the ways in which lack of leadership and reaction to Katrina had devastating results. Initially, emergency response had no idea what it was dealing with. Lack of resources and personnel created great issues. Many people helped neighbors and others instead of waiting for help. Long-term discussion of emergency response is also discussed and critiqued as there were vast issues with that. Inappropriate allocation of funds and the lack of leadership created a mess for both emergency responders and the survivors. 

This article was written by Miriam Ticktin, and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility at the New School. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Before coming to the New School, she was an Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and also held a postdoctoral position in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. Her research primarily focusses on the intersections of the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory.

The citations found in this article's bibliography tell us that the information presented was drawn from various research articles about past responses to large disease outbreaks, and public health policies regarding topics such as food safety and bioweapons. This article is an interpertation of existing information, and does not seem to provide any new research.