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krishna e bera's avatar

Let's start with your unproven assertion that "1956, in a time when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was in the process of reducing the cases of paralytic polio in the United States from tens of thousands to less than 100 each year". What actually happened was, several different conditions (other diseases plus arsenic and ddt poisoning) were misdiagnosed as polio, and then when the vaccine was introduced diagnosis criteria were made much narrower. In addition, as nutrition and sanitation improved, the need for pesticides declined and people's immunity improved. The polio virus itself was never a major problem, but the various treatments used for polio-like illness were, especially surgeries and immobilization. See "Dissolving Illusions" for details.

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JohnM543's avatar

Yes, thank you for mentioning the pesticide hypothesis

Turtles All The Way Down devoted about 120 pages to exploring polio... Fascinating stuff, and a lot of unproven assumptions

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