It wasn't just India that had smallpox deities smallpox deities were prevalent all over the world.

And they caught smallpox in the one remaining place that had smallpox, and they went home to die.

Smallpox early detection, early response.

We declared smallpox eradicated in 1980.

We've seen the eradication of smallpox.

Everybody is immune to smallpox nowadays.

But in that year, smallpox exploded throughout India.

OK, now smallpox is an extremely distressing illness.

Larry Brilliant Smallpox was the worst disease in history.

I wanted to show you the stages of smallpox.

But smallpox eradication was hard it was very, very hard.

The key to eradicating smallpox was early detection, early response.

Day seven, they show the classic scars of smallpox umbilication.

In that year, there were 34 countries affected with smallpox.

So, how we eradicated smallpox was max vaccination wouldn't work.

They are struggling with the goal of wiping out smallpox.

There are other kinds of smallpox that are not like that.

Flat smallpox, which killed 100 percent of people who got it.

I've probably had 50 women die. They all had hemorrhagic smallpox.

And India was the place where smallpox made its last stand.

But smallpox was the fourth disease that was intended for eradication.

We had Dr. Larry Brilliant talking about how we eradicated smallpox.

When you read the biblical plague of boils, that was smallpox.

Pharaoh Ramses the Fifth, whose picture is here, died of smallpox.

Here we come down with the eradication of smallpox, better education, health service.

I got to see the last case of killer smallpox in the world.

But to see smallpox from the perspective of a sovereign is the wrong perspective.

Images of limb regeneration and faces filled with smallpox 21 percent of the conference.

In the Summer of Love, in 1967, two million people, children, died of smallpox.

To eradicate smallpox, we had to gather the largest United Nations army in history.

Because I thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated.

And hemorrhagic smallpox, the most cruel of all, which had a predilection for pregnant women.

And when they did, they took smallpox to 10 other countries and reignited the epidemic.

So even if somebody made the smallpox genome, that DNA itself would not cause infections.

But the third challenge we have and probably even bigger one, the biggest challenge is that, in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash.

He went there after the death of his wife of smallpox and brought his two young children.

It should make you optimistic that smallpox no longer exists because it was the worst disease in history.

There's a vetted press release that you can read it's vetted by DOD if you Google Stamets and smallpox.

So, we searched and we searched, and we found every case of smallpox in India. We had a reward.

We visited every house in India, searching for smallpox 120 million houses, once every month, for nearly two years.

There are 20 million people on the road at any time in buses and trains, walking, 500,000 villages, 120 million households, and none of them wanted to report if they had a case of smallpox in their house because they thought that smallpox was the visitation of a deity, Shitala Mata, the cooling mother, and it was wrong to bring strangers into your house when the deity was in the house. No incentive to report smallpox.

You can see, with independence, literacy improved and vaccinations started, smallpox was eradicated, hygiene was improved, and things got better.

Every time we did a house to house search, we had a spike in the number of reports of smallpox.

And people immediately freak out about things about Ebola or smallpox, but the DNA from this organism is not infective.

The Government has developed a Pandemic Influenza (Pan Flu) Response Plan and an Airport Contingency Plan for Smallpox and has also contracted the development of an overall Territorial Smallpox Emergency Response Plan, which will complement the Pan Flu Plan and be the template for other extreme disease related health emergencies.