[Music]
[Narrarator:] Today, these men, soldiers of a free country, are leaving to fight.
Today our battlefield is the world.
Our transports, our freighters, go to the furthest islands of the earth.
Men of the United Nations are landing everywhere.
Soldiers from New York and Chicago are moving up to fight in the empty desert.
To fight on battlefields of snow.
And in the jungle, men from the little towns of Montana, moving up in the heat of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean.
Their job is fighting.
They must be kept safe -- against disease, against the special dangers of the jungle.
Behind all men stand scientists of the western hemisphere.
These doctors are good neighbors from two American countries: United States and the Republic of Colombia.
Here were their first battles.
Their weapons: the test tube, the sterilized needle.
Between the equator and the Panama Canal they fought their silent war.
Their enemy was hidden in the green branches of the jungle.
Here the heat of the sky pours down 12 hours a day.
There is no autumn, no spring, only months of heat and months of rain.
Life is quick and abundant, and death is also abundant.
Here was the home of jungle yellow fever.
A man who came here to work, or to fight, on these dark trails was condemned to grow sick, delirious.
Eyes and skin turning yellow before he died.
A disease of young men, of those who built a house or camp in the infected forest.
Death waited for them in the heat of the valley.
Wooden crosses for the young men who dared to walk in the jungle.
They died from the bite of a mosquito.
In a few laboratories they put this disease behind glass and studied it.
It was a virus, it had to be fed on living tissue, on unborn chicks, and human blood serum.
It was dangerous and invisible. Had killed men who had worked with it.
What they needed was a vaccine to prevent yellow fever and the fight never stopped 'til it was found.
'Til it was tested, purified. 'Til it could be dried and frozen and prepared in quantities.
Until it could be transported.
The first battle had been won inside the white walls of a laboratory.
The second battle was here, in the heat and wet of the jungle.
Above their heads was the solution to the mystery of jungle yellow fever.
The guilty mosquitoes lived and bred not in pools on the ground, but in the treetops.
They bit not only men, but animals - especially monkeys.
And thousands of monkeys grew sick but did not die.
Their blood was a living reservoir of yellow fever.
Mosquitoes which had fed on these monkeys, flew down from the treetops, attacked men, and infected them with a virus of yellow fever.
The ride on these trails became a sentence of death.
But carried in this thermos jug, too precious to go on mule-back, are tubes of vaccine packed in ice.
Moving over narrow trails and slippery bridges.
In a jungle area without railroads, without highways. Across rivers too steep for navigation.
At night they set up their portable refrigerator unit to renew the supply of ice.
In the morning, it is carried on mule back with the needles and syringes.
A task force against yellow fever.
It's a grey hot Sunday in the town of Copair [?]. It's market day, too, and there is good news.
Yes, it is true. The doctors are coming.
[Bell tower rings]
Sunday mass is just over and in front of the church the news spreads.
It is true, it is printed.
It is signed by the mayor. The priest himself has given his blessing.
It has come at last.
Now, the slow pack-train climbs up the hill from the jungle.
The doctors have come to the town of Copair.
Fiebre amarilla. The yellow fever. The fever that eats men, that kills their father,their brothers.
The fever of the jungle is to be feared no longer.
The blessed medicine has come.
Years of difficult work, years of collaboration between men of the United States, Cuba, Panama, Brazil, Colombia.
Years of courage in the laboratory and in the jungle come to their climax here, in this patio of the mayor's house.
The vaccination will be here in the open air.
It is a dull, cloudy afternoon, two hundred miles north of the equator.
The vaccine is removed from the thermos jug.
The instruments are sterilized in boiling water.
There are people here who read slowly, others who have never learned, but there's one word they know: vacunacion.
Vaccination. That word means life.
And they know one thing more -- that if three are sick with yellow fever, two will surely die and only one will live.
The names of the people are written down.
The harness-maker's wife; a farmer; his son.
A woman is the first to be vaccinated and now two more.
These are a mixed people, descendents of Indians and of the Spanish conquerors.
A few drops of vaccine injected under the skin of the arm will give them dependable and lasting immunity.
Those whose names are in this book need have no fear of yellow fever.
And there's only one shot and there is no illness afterwards.
The protection lasts for years, perhaps for life.
It is a product of the genius of the combined Americans.
Already five hundred thousand citizens of Colombia have been vaccinated.
Now the vaccine is taken to army hospitals where the entire Colombian army, unit-by-unit, is vaccinated against yellow fever.
Now they can go safely to their outposts in the jungle.
These soldiers are safe and because of this pioneering work, when our heavy guns are lifted in the jungle, the men behind them will be strong.
Ready to fight in the African Congo, on the dark islands of the South Pacific, in the jungles of Burma, in the Solomon's,
in the depths of New Guinea, in the Philippines when we've come to take them one-by-one.
Our men, today, are safe against yellow fever.
Free to fight the worst disease of all: fascism.
Until that too, shall be blasted from the face of the earth.
[The End]