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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?

As the disasters studied occurred many years ago and have been thoroughly studied previously this study did not present sufficiently new information to be disseminated through news reports. The study did however provide information of interest for future studies, and has been cited in other articles indicating it was used as reference in determining the effectiveness of research techniques.

The data collected in the scientific studies included in the report began in March 2011 shortly after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima and continued for periods spanning months and years depending on the tests being done.

Emergency response is not portrayed, in fact the film shows the importance of understanding when not to respond. While it is the instinct of responders to always try something else if treatment is ineffective the patient’s wishes always come first, for a medical professional this can feel like giving up but in cases like these it is the right thing to do.

The program is funded primarily by Handicap International, with additional funding from the United States Agency for International Development.

The apps described were built to serve anyone who was a victim of sexual assault, which is not limited by demographics. One app was however aimed at college students, likely because there is a higher risk of sexual assault for that age range.

Stakeholders from every level of the health care system were mentioned, as well as he portrayal of Liberians in the quarantine zones and living in Monrovia. For the citizens in quarantine zones, the film emphasized the challenges that come from an outbreak including food and water shortages, fear, and the rising tension caused by a lack of information and the government’s actions. The main family followed throughout the film was faced with the challenge of trying to get out of Monrovia and bringing their children the United States to join the rest of the family, an understandable decision in a time of crises. The decision to leave Monrovia however directly opposes the decisions made by the government and health officials who imposed quarantines as a way of containing the virus, and were forced to lift the quarantines due to rioting.

The data used to support the claims of the article were from existing sources such as the Aid Worker Security Database, as well as from the interviews and focus groups help by the authors. It is important to note that the methods used to support the argument depended on data that may be incomplete, from questionable sources, or biased due to the lack of research and dependable data gathering for this topic.

This article has been referenced in several articles, although due to the number of scientific articles written about the World Trade Center Collapse there are likely more. One such article is “Dealing with Disaster: The Politics of Catastrophe in the United States, 1789-1861”.

No bibliography is available in the PDF as the article is a published as the third chapter in a book. The bibliography of the book found online does not separate sources by chapter, however the extensive list of sources and historical aspect of the article suggests a significant amount of research into the statistics and available archived applications.