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.
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.
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.
Kellie Shirley's debut.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content
