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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?

1) “The issue at stake is the state's capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge and nonknowledge [sic] to maintain political order.”

2) "Today, approximately 8.9 percent of Ukraine is considered contaminated."

3) “Dr. Guskova, who oversees the Russian compensation In Russia, the number of people considered affected and compensable has been kept to a mini-mum and remains fairly stable… told me that Ukrainians were inflating their numbers of exposed persons, that their so-called invalids ‘didn't want to re- cover.’ She saw the illnesses of this group as a "struggle for power and material resources related to the disaster.”

The author mainly draws from experience in organizational theory & disaster social issues as well as citing many specialists in the nuclear world as well as those who have hands on experience in disaster response.

The main point of the article is that doctors need individual stories about patient success stories but that the current medical community has largely done away with this. His argument is that that are needed because of their impact on patients, their use in identifying problems like depression, knowing others have felt the same or have the same condition can give hope, and they can inspire research agendas.

The IAEA finds cooperation between the industry, member countries, and the IAEA to be particularly challenging.

1) International courts came to agreement that gender based acts of violence, such as rape, constitute a crime against humanity.

2)  When gender is erased from the picture it removes the why, what, and how of the incident as well as ting to be uniform in care but also recognizing biological differences between men and women, gender differences and how that changes treatment, care, and outcome.

3) Human rights activists have been championing to address violence against women since the 1980s which later turned into “gender based violence” so that it would broaden the scope to include any gender. 

                The study was funded by the CDC which is a government organization of the United States of America.

The main narrative of the film “In the Shadow of Ebola” is to show the impact from the top to bottom of the disease and the response to that disease. This includes international decisions affecting the nation of Liberia, the national government’s actions affecting the local communities and families there. Disease awareness and infrastructure are the main focus.

1) “It has been six months, and nobody knows who is responsible for what. It is a disgrace.”

2) “Six months after the World Trade Center collapse, the greatest structural disaster in modern history, people were still seeking to answer the question: why exactly had the Towers collapsed?”

3) “With the exception of federal oversight, Iroquois set the tone for investigation of modern disaster from the Baltimore Conflagration (1904) to the World Trade Center collapse.”

The article’s arguments are supported by case studies and statistics.