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.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Gwyn Campbell;
Eva-Maria Knoll;
(2020)
Disease Dispersion and Impact in the Indian Ocean World
(/isis/citation/CBB762784175/)
Book
Kinkela, David;
(2011)
DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World
(/isis/citation/CBB001212493/)
Book
Straumann, Lukas;
(2005)
Nützliche Schädlinge: Angewandte Entomologie, chemische Industrie und Landwirtschaftspolitik in der Schweiz 1874--1952
(/isis/citation/CBB000773896/)
Book
Patterson, Gordon;
(2004)
The Mosquito Wars: A History of Mosquito Control in Florida
(/isis/citation/CBB000830659/)
Article
Patrick T. O'Shaughnessy;
(2008)
Parachuting Cats and Crushed Eggs the Controversy Over the Use of DDT to Control Malaria
(/isis/citation/CBB204341151/)
Thesis
Kinkela, David;
(2005)
Pesticides, Politics, and the Dilemmas of Regulation: DDT and the International Context of United States Environmentalism, 1943--1982
(/isis/citation/CBB001560567/)
Article
George Dehner;
(July 2018)
Legionnaires’ Disease: Building a Better World for You
(/isis/citation/CBB422956787/)
Thesis
Heather A. Dron;
(2016)
Teratology Transformed: Uncertainty, Knowledge, and Conflict over Environmental Etiologies of Birth Defects in Midcentury America
(/isis/citation/CBB332636641/)
Article
Warwick Anderson;
(2017)
Nowhere to Run, Rabbit: The Cold-War Calculus of Disease Ecology
(/isis/citation/CBB593910187/)
Article
Nash, Linda;
(2004)
The Fruits of Ill-Health: Pesticides and Workers' Bodies in Post-World War II California
(/isis/citation/CBB000750328/)
Article
Schmalzer, Sigrid;
(2013)
Insect Control in Socialist China and the Corporate United States: The Act of Comparison, the Tendency to Forget, and the Construction of Difference in 1970s U.S.--Chinese Scientific Exchange
(/isis/citation/CBB001320193/)
Article
Piper, Liza;
(2015)
Chesterfield Inlet, 1949, and the Ecology of Epidemic Polio
(/isis/citation/CBB001553564/)
Article
Báguena Cervellera, M. J.;
(2009)
Estudios epidemiológicos y virológicos sobre la poliomielitis en Valencia (1959--1969)
(/isis/citation/CBB000931886/)
Article
Matthew Holmes;
(2020)
Houseflies and Fungi: The Promise of an Early Twentieth-Century Biotechnology
(/isis/citation/CBB156717395/)
Article
Jarman, Walter M.;
Ballschmiter, Karlheinz;
(2012)
From Coal to DDT: The History of the Development of the Pesticide DDT from Synthetic Dyes till Silent Spring
(/isis/citation/CBB001251547/)
Book
Slongwhite, Dale Finley;
Economos, Jeannie;
(2014)
Fed up: The High Costs of Cheap Food
(/isis/citation/CBB001422400/)
Article
Junho Jung;
(2022)
DDT Resistance Korean Body Lice and Development of Insecticide Resistance Knowledge during Korean War
(/isis/citation/CBB000729912/)
Article
Soppelsa, Peter;
Rodgers, Amy S.;
(July 2019)
Origins of the Flyswatter
(/isis/citation/CBB147342700/)
Book
Dunlap, Thomas R.;
(2008)
DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism: Classic Texts
(/isis/citation/CBB000951854/)
Article
Sabine Clarke;
Thomas Lean;
(2022)
Turning DDT into ‘Didimac’: Making insecticide products and consumers in British farming after 1945
(/isis/citation/CBB370641678/)
Technology and Culture
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science
Korean Journal of Medical History
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Be the first to comment!