Polio Elimination Due to Vaccination, Not End of Pesticide Use

SciCheck Digest

Polio, a paralytic disease caused by a virus, has been eliminated in the U.S. — and nearly wiped out globally — thanks to vaccines. But social media posts are reviving old, false claims that polio is instead caused by pesticides and outbreaks of the disease ended when people stopped using DDT.

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In the 1940s and 1950s, Americans were terrorized by the threat of polio. Every summer, the highly contagious viral disease caused outbreaks that killed or paralyzed people, most of them children. At polio’s peak in 1952, there were nearly 58,000 cases in the U.S., including more than 3,000 deaths and 21,000 instances of mild or disabling paralysis.

Relief came with the development of polio vaccines: first, with Jonas Salk’s vaccine, made from inactivated, or killed, polioviruses, in 1955, followed by Albert .