Y’all can blame my childhood public library’s extensive Nancy Drew collection for this one.

Atop the sun-warmed, petal soft, leather seats of my new, dark blue, mustang convertible, my short, titan (aka blonde) hair flitting gently in the wind… Eh scratch that. This is North Dakota-

Huddled in the front seat of my rust freckled, cookie cutter white minivan, the wind is howling past the angled frosty glass. My granny pants and sweatshirt clad, messy-bunned mom-bod… ( yeah… So much not at all like a 16 year old tennis player, in fashionable frocks and delectable heels) … I’m waiting to pick up the littles from school. I got here way too early as the roads were unexpectedly much more drivable. They (the roads) were in that rare perfect condition that’s not too dusty, not too muddy, not too icy and neither just graded nor badly in need of a new scrap-down. (Ah… North Dakota, where we wax poetic about road conditions…)

Being early, the buses aren’t even lined up in front of the school yet and probably won’t be for some time. I’ve no shopping to do and won’t wander mask-land (the local stores) for fun. Thus, I tootled over to the bus barn, where all the giant, yellow, kid-transportation-tubes are getting ready to go.

The drivers are presumably doing whatever it is they do, flipping switches and kicking tires I guess, when I notice a tall, sandy-blonde haired, man dash out of the folded-glass, bus door at the end of the line. Through the tiny, double hung, windows facing me, I can see the bus filling with a grey mist. What in the world?

Curiosity hasn’t gotten me into any dastardly peril yet, so let the investigation begin! Turning my car back-around towards the main door of the school and I park as close as humanly, legally possible. It’s an unusually cold day here (which is really saying something) so I bundle up before venturing out onto the frozen path I have to walk to see the all-knowing school secretary.

The kindly, and nearly omniscient, secretary informs me, that due to the local school board’s COVID-19 Pandemic Response Plan, every use of a public school bus now has to be either preceded by or followed by a germ fogger, hence the mist. The runner likely didn’t want to get the chemical stew on himself. (Smart man)

Most of us would be happy if I stopped right there. No more intrepid sleuthing needed! Hey, it’s no big deal, they are just killing germs to keep children and everyone else safe. Nancy Drew taught me however, there’s always more to the story. I have a hunch there are bits of information some would people rather not be brought to light. Which of course, I can’t just walk away from. “I don’t promise to [solve] the mystery, but I know I’ll have a marvelous time.” -Nancy

Courtesy of my 4G cellphone internet connection and YouTube I learn that the germ fogger, is about the size of a can of Barbasol. You flip the tab on the top and stuff starts shooting out like a very well shaken can of Busch light. (Or in North Dakota the one can of beer your forgot in your mom’s car last night, that partially froze and then burst… ) And then… You run. (From the germ fogger, not your mom.)

The germ fogger is full of propellants like ethyl alcohol, and propane. (1) These work to shoot the fungicide, bactericide, virucide cocktail all over the ceilings, windows, walls, seats and floors. So next, I read the MSDS safety sheet and set about Firefoxing (like Googling but with more factual information and less empty-headed propaganda) the ingredients. I’m looking up things like “n-Alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride” which it turns out is a very potent poison. “There’s got to be an explanation. So, what do we know?”-Nancy D

The ingredients of the germ foggers I reviewed include things that cause reactions like: respiratory irritation, difficulty breathing, long-term impaired lung function, disruption of the senses of taste and smell, skin irritation and redness, stomach upset, a slight fever -oh and death due to lung failure and cancer. (Links to this information is at the bottom. (2))

Okay, so what do we know? Well one part of my brain says,”Uh, how many kids have licked something on the bus or… touched the seat and then scratched their eye or picked their nose?” Another part of my brain says, “Well golly gee, that list’s awfully similar to this list of symptoms I’m supposed to check my kids for every morning.” There’s got to be an explanation for that! And a third part of my brain says, “Remind you of anything from the 1950s???”

Whether or not we are in the midst of our own ‘The Case of the Missing Information,’ there was another similar situation about 70 years ago. I’m guessing we all know something of the 1942-1962 polio epidemic. What most don’t know is that great quanitities of information is missing- information that was hidden and lost. For example, this is a really popular image that gets shared “from the polio epidemic:”

Few however, know that this image is actually from a movie set. Nothing like this actually happened. Sure there were iron lungs used. However, at no point was the epidemic so awful that hospitals, or in this case a gymnasium, were chock full of them.

Even if we follow Nancy’s advice to “Read, read,read” it’s hard to find the missing information from the polio epidemic. Just like today, it was very unpopular to have a different analysis. Those few determined souls who attempted to share the information for the good of others experienced persecution, regardless of their ability to be as careful as a pussycat on a tin roof. One scientist even had his home set on fire. Unfortunately, Nancy Drew wasn’t there to stick her little button nose into it.

Poliomyelitis, for those who may not know, causes paralysis, deformity, and death. It primarily effected children at that time and recovery was very difficult to achieve. Full recovery was unattainable for many thousands of children.

Poliomyelitis, the virus, was spread through fecal contamination and through saliva (poop and spit). Unlike the “novel coronavirus” poliomyelitis was not spread through air-borne virus particles. People in general at that time knew more about illnesses than we do today. For example, just because you were exposed to a virus, didn’t mean you would get sick. Thus, there was no idiotic calls to “maskup”. However, there was a nationwide call to clean, clean, clean as hand washing and cleaning had always been a good strategy in the past. (3)

The best new, exciting and mysterious virucides (virus killers) on the market were Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), benzene hexachloride (BH) and other “new” chemicals, heralded as “The Synthetics.” (4, 5)

DDT especially was marketed as the great savior of the people. It killed, bugs, viruses, germs, mold etc etc. DDT was the first of the modern synthetic pesticides developed in the 1940s. People could see that it worked. Spray a mosquito with it and the contemptible thing fell out of the sky like an enemy plane from WWII.

What no one noticed was that it killed children too. Granted (much like today) the wealth of advertisements extolling the virtues of this remedy made it hard to see the forest, for the trees. So when polio first grew into an epidemic, the natural response for many, was DDT or one of the other “new synthetics” like BH. And when the polio epidemic spiked again, the response was more DDT, more synthetic saviors! (5)

It was only when American farmers began to unravel The Mystery of the Unhealthy Herds did they notice that cows that ate grain sprayed with DDT and the like, were less healthy and that the calves of such cows developed paralysis, deformities and death that the use of these “cleaning” chemicals in America began to decrease. (5) Even though parents and local authorities may have still been spraying these chemicals with abandon, removing it from the dairy industry was revolutionary.

The fact that DDT is stored by the body in fat had been known by the FDA for more than a decade, but those trying explain the danger of DDT to the public could not get their message out. The message that these harmful chemicals were stored in fat including milk wasn’t as popular or as obvious as literal dropping flies. So the fact that not only were little bitty calves drinking DDT laced milk, so were little bitty humans went unheard, it was missing from the public knowledge base. Mostly, it still is.

Thanks to dairy farmers, as the use of DDT and the new synthetics began to decline in the early 1950s, and so too did the number of polio cases. The chart below compares the rate of polio cases to the rate of use of the chemicals that caused infantile paralysis, deformities and death.

The vaccine for poliomyelitis was first tested on 4,000 children in 1954. More than one million children were included in the 1955 field trial. The vaccine was available for all children in America in last 1955/early 1956. (7) Please find 1955 and 1956 on the graph above. (7)

When we look back at the 1942-1962 poliomyelitis epidemic, it is primarily utilized as a great example of the success of vaccines. Some of the missing information though, is that despite the success of the vaccine, the incidence of polio was already well past it’s peak. “In 1958, a laboratory analysis of 222 diagnosed polio victims of the Detroit epidemic found polio-virus in only 51 percent of the cases.” (9) The other 49% of polio cases were not caused by the virus poliomyelitis. Rather they were caused by poisoning, other viruses, fungi and bacteria. Viruses, fungi and bacteria that were either not killed by DDT or developed into “super germs.”

In 1938 FDR founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and later created a contract with the United States Government that paid for the poliomyelitis treatment of any child diagnosed. (9) Poliomyelitis treatments often cost more than the average American house. So pestering doctors to find out if your child’s illness was caused by a virus or one of the many environmental factors listed above was extremely cost prohibitive. Just like Covid-19 today, calling any and all childhood paralysis viral poliomyelitis had a great financial incentive. (10)

What now? There’s no villain to cleverly capture, hand over to the a fictitious, lawyer father and the sheriff. There’s no three paragraph exposition to succinctly wrap up The Case of the Missing Information. Shaggy and Scooby can’t even be bait. There’s also the unhappy little tidbit that masks can cause the same symptoms too. A bit like the many causes later discovered for child paralysis, the covid-19 symptoms are not exclusive to covid-19. After all, the “novel coronavirus”is just one of a “large family of coronaviruses” that have been around so long, no one actually knows how long. Further, it looks like Covid-19 has mutated and will mutate more creating different strains. (11) Thus, like the flu vaccine, we will be needing regular vaccine updates possibly as often as every three months.

Our best chance of a happily ever after, is to follow Nancy’s advice, “Read, read, read,” “be mysterious,” “follow [our] women’s intuition” and don’t be afraid “of those men who are not going to stand for sticking [our] little noses into their affairs.” What we hope for is to protect our children, friends, family, the most vulnerable and so so many others. Perhaps, by following the example of Ms. Drew and being as aware of the whole picture as we can, we can do that.

Links:

(1) https://safespaceco.com/ingredients-sds/

(2) https://safespaceco.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/FoggerSDS.pdf
https://safespaceco.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AutoMistSDS202o.pdf
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylene_glycol
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/4-tert-Amylphenol#section=Stability-and-Reactivity

(3) https://www.brighthubengineering.com/structural-engineering/77511-water-chlorination-history-the-mid-1800s-through-the-early-1900s/

(4) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ddt+what+is+it&t=fpas&ia=web&iax=about

(5) https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/environmental-toxins/pesticides-and-polio-a-critique-of-scientific-literature/

(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polio

(7)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

(8) https://www.marchofdimes.org/mission/a-history-of-the-march-of-dimes.aspx

(9) Polio Packet, Centers for Disease Control, 1959 as reported in https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/environmental-toxins/pesticides-and-polio-a-critique-of-scientific-literature/

(10) https://www.statesman.com/news/20200422/fact-check-do-hospitals-get-paid-more-to-list-patients-as-having-coronavirus

(11) https://www.webmd.com/lung/coronavirus-strains

(12) https://spectator.org/48925_ddt-fraud-and-tragedy/

(13) https://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/rachel-carson-silent-spring/