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Except for isolated samples being kept alive in laboratories, smallpox, we are told, has been totally eradicated. But this was not so -- even quite recently. This Polish docudrama recounts the true story of an outbreak of this deadly disease in a medium-sized city. A young doctor is forced to leave his new ladyfriend to attend to a medical emergency, which later turns out to be an outbreak of smallpox. While he and the medical community work frantically, night and day, political authorities conceal the real extent of the problem so that the public does not know enough to get worried. The outbreak is quelled, but it was a near thing. When the doctor sees his former love again, she and her new man are scornful of him because they do not know what he has just been through and wouldn't believe him if he told them.