DDT is good for me-e-e!

DDT may have played a significant role in the polio epidemics of the 1940s and 50s. By the early 1960s, it finally became understood that DDT was having a devastating impact on the environment and possibly human health.
 

DDT spraying and DDT delousing were both extremely, and terrifyingly, common before this realization.

In 1953, Morton S. Biskind published a damning report called “Public health aspects of the new insecticides.” A decade before Rachel Carson would release her groundbreaking Silent Spring, Biskind was desperately trying to sound the alarm:

It was even known by 1945 that DDT is stored in the body fat of mammals and appears in the milk. With this foreknowledge the series of catastrophic events that followed the most intensive campaign of mass poisoning in known human history, should not have surprised the experts.

Yet, far from admitting a causal relationship so obvious that in any other field of biology it would be instantly accepted, virtually the entire apparatus of communication, lay and scientific alike, has been devoted to denying, concealing, suppressing, distorting and attempts to convert into its opposite, the overwhelming evidence. Libel, slander and economic boycott have not been overlooked in this campaign.

Dr. Biskind had the composure to argue what he thought was the most obvious explanation for the polio epidemic: Central nervous system diseases (CNS) such as polio are actually the physiological and symptomatic manifestations of the ongoing government- and industry-sponsored inundation of the world's populace with central nervous system poisons.

Biskind emphasized physiological evidence of DDT poisoning that resembled polio physiology:

Particularly relevant to recent aspects of this problem are neglected studies by Lillie and his collaborators of the National Institutes of Health, published in 1944 and 1947 respectively, which showed that DDT may produce degeneration of the anterior horn cells of the spinal cord in animals. These changes do not occur regularly in exposed animals any more than they do in human beings, but they do appear often enough to be significant.

He continues, bearing his exasperation in trying to make the obvious plain. “When the population is exposed to a chemical agent known to produce in animals lesions in the spinal cord resembling those in human polio, and thereafter the latter disease increases sharply in incidence and maintains its epidemic character year after year, is it unreasonable to suspect an etiologic relationship?”

A German study of the physiology of acute DDT poisoning confirmed that DDT often causes polio-like physiology.

Biskind's views fell into disfavor after the introduction of the polio vaccine, which “proved” to most that the majority of polio cases were caused by a virus. By 1955, Biskind, whose works had been published in established medical journals and who testified before the Senate on the dangers of pesticides, was forced self-publish his writings.