This is Backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. As a civil war ground to a halt, the journey from

millions of former slaves was just beginning. A smallpox epidemic was ravishing

their camps. A terrible scene made more terrible by the callous attitude of

their white neighbors. Some people fall back on this popular fiction of the 19th

century that black people would go extinct if freed. 40 years later people on

the margins were again dying from smallpox this time in New York. But the

response was different. Doctors and police officers burst into immigrants

homes to vaccinate them by force. With mothers trying to hide sick babies with

men actually brawling with health officials and police to prevent them from

scraping their arms and rubbing the vaccine into their arms. Today I'm Backstory

a history of epidemics. What has the government done and not done to stop

contagious disease?

Major funding for Backstory is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation, the

National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial

Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia

Foundation for the Humanities this is Backstory with the American History Guide.

Welcome to Backstory. I'm Peter Onough. I'm Ed Ayers. And I'm Brian Ballot.

There is growing concern tonight about the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne

infection with possible links to birth defects. The head of the World Health

Organization says the Zika virus is spreading explosively in the

Americas especially in Brazil. These efforts are on all fronts. They're trying to

come up with a vaccine against Zika and they're also trying to get more places

...