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Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro
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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?

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Alexi Martin
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Emergency response is addressed in the article through actions taken by health organizations in threat of an epidemic, national boards use emergency response as a way of protecting  their country  from disease, even though this is most effective through research and prevention. The idea of emergency response is global health security- in keeping the US healthy from epidemics in the past; we were not prepared for AIDS or swine flu.

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Alexi Martin
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The main findings presented in the article is that finding accurate data on violence to healthcare workers is difficult, there are many types of violence and the incidents may not be reported due to fear the participants in the event may have chose not to report them. Violence can also be defined in many different ways creating discrepancies in reporting.

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Alexi Martin
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“With this promising technology, though, arrived a whole series of risks,catastrophic boiler explosions being the most dramatic and the deadliest.”

 

“Dr. Astweh-Asel had no idea then how serendipitous and how surprisingly rare this meeting between investigator and wreckage would come to seem in the weeks and months ahead.”

 

“ No one argued with him over these reinventions in principal, but he was thwarted time and time again over the next fifteen years as he tried to defend them in practice.”

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Alexi Martin
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The data is visualized on an easy to read dashboard with labelled features, a personalized profile, ability to video chat, chats that track emotional and mental status via app and sensors, secured servers, ability to find providers, etc.

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Alexi Martin
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The author Sonja D. Schmid is an assistant progessor in STS at Virgina Tech. her areas of expertise include the history and set-up of previous Soviet Union nuclear powerplants and those in Eastern Europe. She also studies te way interational energy polices, the choice of techology and application affect each other. Her experience comes from studying the Soviet Union nuclear polices and interviewing those who had previous been involved in nuclear activites in Soviet Union nuclear industry.