DDT ban didn’t stop U.S. polio epidemic, vaccines did

Health experts credit widespread polio vaccination for eliminating the disease in the United States, but not everyone is buying it. 

"Polio stopped when they stopped dousing the population with DDT not some injection," reads the text on a Jan. 22 Instagram post, above three black-and-white images of something unidentifiable being sprayed on and around people. 

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Reverse-image searches for the photos found they show undated footage of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a now-banned pesticide better known as DDT, "being sprayed over children in Texas;" a "child crying as she is sprayed with DDT delousing powder" in Germany in 1945; and a truck spraying DDT in 1945 to eliminate mosquitoes on Jones Beach on Long Island, New York.

U.S. communities used DDT to try to staunch polio’s spread in the 1940s, but researchers eventually found that it did nothing to combat the disease. The last few towns sprayed DDT for polio control in 1953, The Washington Post reported, and in 1954, 1 million children signed up for a polio vaccine trial. The federal government licensed the vaccine in 1955 and over the next two years, cases plummeted. 

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"Polio has been eliminated from the United States thanks to widespread polio vaccination in this country," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Polio was eliminated in the United States by 1979, though travelers have brought it into the country since then. Public health officials believe that a case identified in New York last year originated overseas. 

Polio predates DDT, which was first synthesized in 1874, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Polio has existed since prehistoric times, the World Health Organization says. The first known clinical description of polio dates back to 1789 and it was formally recognized as a disease in 1840. 

The disease is caused by the poliovirus, not DDT, and spreads through person-to-person contact. 

We rate claims that the vaccine wasn’t responsible for eliminating polio in the United States and banning DDT are False.