The insecticide, DDT, has never stopped being used in places like India, Africa and other Malaria problem areas. While researching the connection between DDT and polio I came accross the info. that the U.S. had recently manufactured 9 tons of DDT.. This info came to my attention about 1998.. Knowing DDT had been illegal for many years in the U.S. I
wanted to know what the heck they were doing with it. I couldn't find any info on the internet so I typed in where are the recent polio cases.. Bingo.. India, Africa,ect. and yes they used the DDT that was manufactured in the U.S.
Seems the choice was made for polio over malaria.. very tough choice.. except polio is not spead from personal contact . Malaria is, via the mosquitoe. Check it out.
.France

Couple of things. 1st, Polio is primarily spread person to person via the fecal-oral route. The choice was not malaria over polio. Two different diseases, two different routes.

Second, I would quibble with the choice of the 5 most problematic diseases. Malaria; TB, especially drug resistant TB; HIV; Pandemic influenza; and Heart Disease.
The last isn't person to person transmissible, but it is the leading cause of death in both the developed and under-developed countries. Malaria and TB are exploding and the incidence of multi-drig resistant TB is especially troubling. HIV has virtually eliminated a whole generation in some countries, and pandemic influenza WILL happen again, the only questions are when, where it will start, how virulent it will be, and what virus will be the cause.

Anyone out there that cares about the truth about polio and DDT surf the net. It takes some digging but soon you will find sites like www.squidoo.com/poliovaccineconnection and there are others with graphs that show the years of the rise and fall of DDT and Polio. The graphs placed on top of one another will give you chills at least they did me.. Also there is a lot of info concerning the argument that if DDT is the cause of polio why didn't our animals get it.. Well they did! They developed all the symtoms that people did. It just wasn't published as such and was kept quiet for obvious reasons..

Do some people seriously think an insecticide causes a virus? How? How could something designed to kill organisms, create a different organism?

I can dig on the web and find all sorts of sites saying martians live among us, but that doesn't make it true. Graphs or no.

It's not so much that "an insecticide causes a virus" as much as an insecticide can weaken someone's immune system and a virus can tip the balance and proliferate.

For example, it's been well documented that exposing a group to a virus will not lead to 100% illness of the group even with a 100% infection rate. Why is this? What is different about a sick person and a healthy one, even though both are infected with the virus? The primary difference is that the sick one's immune system couldn't keep the virus in check and the healthy person's could.

DDT, like all organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides, disrupts the central nervous system (CNS). (http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2008-03/parkinson-linked-pesticides)

The immune system is heavily regulated by the CNS. So it is plausible that polio outbreaks could correlate to DDT based parasite eradication programs. The mode of action is still not well understood, but more and more research is making links between synthetic molecules like DDT and diseases of the central nervous system.