Smallpox

Narrator (voice)

Jack Hill

Lesley Peters

Kathleen O'Reilly

New York Reporter

Carl Jocelyn

Sam Wiseman

Richard Benson

Pierre Lefevre

Rachel Smits

Dr. Farah Khanum

Nigel Woods

Chief Supt. Clive McAdams

John Peters

Nancy Peters

Mary Cooper

Trish Cooper

Sean Cooper

Himself

Male - US Promo Spots

Himself (US version)

Himself (US version)

Young girl

Teenage Girl (uncredited)

FX acquired the rights to the film in 2004 from the UK-based production company Wall to Wall Productions. It then re-shot sequences involving the impact of the titular smallpox epidemic on an average British family, substituting an American family living in London.

In the introduction, narrator Brian Cox gives the worldwide death toll for the Great Smallpox Pandemic of 2002 as 60 million. By contrast, the Black Death of 1340s, generally regarded as the deadliest pandemic in recorded history - at least in absolute terms - is estimated to have killed 75 million people worldwide.

Three of the people appearing in this film were not actors but were, in fact, individuals who each played significant roles in the recent history of smallpox. Only one of these has his personal history recounted in any great detail, Ken Alibek (formerly Kanatjan Alibekov), who served as deputy director and chief scientist of the Soviet Union's biological warfare program, BioPreparat, from 1987 until 1992, when he left Russia for his native Kazakhstan and ultimately defected to the U.S. Of the other two, Christopher Davis served as part of a team of U.S. and British inspectors that toured the Soviet bioweapons lab at Koltsovo in January 1991. Questioning of Soviet technicians by Davis and one of his British colleagues gave the West their first real inkling (later confirmed after Alibek's defection) that the Soviets were experimenting with live smallpox virus. Donald Henderson (full name, Donald Ainslie Henderson) is correctly identified in the special as director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness, a position he took up at the time of the office's creation in November 2001. From 1966 through 1977, he led the World Health Organization's campaign to eradicate smallpox worldwide. For this, he deserves more credit than perhaps anyone else alive for eliminating smallpox as an endemic disease.

About one out of every 30 Americans live in New York City. We are told 30,000 people died from Smallpox in New York City, and a further 1.5 million died in the United States (a ratio of one out of every 50 American deaths taking place in New York City). The number of New York fatalities therefore appears disproportionately low, particularly since infectious diseases spread more comprehensively in densely populated areas.

Kathleen O'Reilly: We used to believe that the greatest threat to the United States were the nuclear arsenals of a rogue state, but in this world today, a terrorist with the will to sacrifice his own life, armed only with a penknife and a pilot's license, is capable of anything... The greatest threat, as we now know, is a single individual with a $50 chemistry set and the will to decimate the planet.

Jack Hill: As the dead increased, it became apparent that we weren't going to be able to deal with it in a conventional manner in the city morgues. So, we decided to take over Governor's Island and turn it into a morgue. And we took Army issue, air conditioned tents, and every morning when the bodies were collected from the hospitals, they were taken to Governor's Island and laid out. And we filled one tent, and then we filled another tent, and then we filled another tent. And that's what we did with the dead.

Narrator: In 2002, 60 million people worldwide were killed by a disease no one had seen for over 20 years. It was the greatest act of mass murder in history.