Polio, DDT, and Disease Risk in the United States after World War II

Abstract

Between the end of World War II and the early 1950s, researchers, municipal officials, and individuals from Georgia to California employed DDT to stop polio by killing flies, a suspected but debated actor in the disease’s transmission. Despite the prominent place of both polio and DDT in postwar US history, this episode has received scant attention from historians. This essay argues that this little-examined moment captures the tensions between shifting epidemiological concerns and etiological paradigms at midcentury and offers an additional explanation for a risky pesticide’s cultural acceptance. In the context of the certain risk of polio, DDT’s health and environmental risks—well publicized and publicly discussed after the war—receded as its public health promise expanded. The use of DDT in anti-polio efforts and the arguments against it reflected competition between public health approaches based on sanitation and bacteriology, as well as differing conceptions of the environment’s role in human disease. The pesticide was deployed against polio for the better part of a decade despite negative scientific findings concerning its effectiveness. This decision to act on expectation over experimental evidence, this essay argues, reflected the fact that DDT was a war-born “brand” that benefited from ingrained germ consciousness, a boom in consumer culture and advertising, and scientific uncertainty about polio, all of which created a context in which the availability of DDT enabled it to shape research and interventions focused on the disease.

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