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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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Andreas_Rebmann
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Firstly, the bibliography is incrediable thorough and comprehensive. There appears to have been a great deal of research into many aspects of the disaster by these researchers. There were a lot of news articles referenced within the bibliography to captures real events that happened in order to apply those to the greater concept. There were also many anthrological and sociological articles on disasters and their effects within the bibliography, which had been referenced frequently too,

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xiaox
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The author is Didier Fassin works at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, French, social science and anthropology, and the research article is translated by Rachel Gomme.

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xiaox
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There is an interactive tool which can search some grant data by location and disaster. They apply diagram to show the data and easy to analyse. For example, Summary of Disaster Declarations and Grants which can see the Federal declared disaster occurred in each state, and also summary of FEMA’s support for fire, preparedness, mitigation, and assistance. There are also other graphics show different data of disaster and FEMA assistance.

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Andreas_Rebmann
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This was created to support the existing Good Samaritan Policy. The afformentioned policy would not be applicable during biohazard or chemhazard events due to the policy that involve such events. This could cause a delay in treatment that could potentially lead to the deaths of the affected community. In order to allow for treatment without delay the hazard issues would be 'ignored' by the EPA and the responders not prosecuted. They would also receives support from the EPA and FOSC for protecting themselves from any damages lawsuits coming from the potential contamination from the response.

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Andreas_Rebmann
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I read through some information about the Bhopal disaster that was referenced, as well as some other articles on Nuclear Emergency Response. I also found some protocol for Radiation Sickness. (Potassium Iodide, Prussian Blue, DTPA, Neupogen)