Paper short abstract:

Modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are being released in Rio de Janeiro to control viral diseases. Ethnographically attending to the movement of mosquitoes and humans, I examine how these releases happen through alliances and frictions, with contrasting notions of health, science, and inequality.

Paper long abstract:

At the early hours of dawn, a car drives slowly, with the window open just enough so that a global health technician can release a few hundred mosquitoes. The car follows a predefined route, but there are some areas it will not go. In certain "territories," as my interlocutors call it, it is a public health worker who must walk to do the releases, opening tubes filled with mosquitoes as he moves. In gated-communities, where entrance is barred for health workers, the solution is to drive around it, trying to throw mosquitoes across the fortification in the hopes these insects will cross the physical and class barrier these walls represent.

These are snapshots of my fieldwork accompanying a new strategy being implemented in Rio de Janeiro, which uses the Aedes aegypti mosquito in efforts to control the viruses this insect can transmit, namely Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. Brazilian researchers are part of an international Gates Foundation-funded project, which proposes to release A. aegypti infected with Wolbachia bacteria, a microbe that can inhibit the mosquito's capacity to transmit pathogens. Ethnographically attending to the movement of mosquitoes and the humans who must walk and drive through the city to release them, my work examines how these releases show the alliances and frictions between global and public health, between geographies of health and science, of violence and inequality, of precarity and austerity.