John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 9 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
The summer before we were stricken, Mom bought a bunch of military surplus pressure bottles full of DDT. And we really sprayed that stuff around the milkhouse and all over the kitchen. A lot got into our food, you know, because we didn't realize what we were doing. I mean, this was the latest thing wasn't it? Direct from Uncle Sam. The best. It was what our army had used in camps all over the world. Guaranteed to kill every fly it touched.
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Well it didn't kill every fly. As a matter of fact, insects in general — the creatures that DDT was supposed to kill — quickly developed a surprising immunity to the poison. Birds and small mammals weren't so adaptable, however. And I've got a sneaking hunch that people weren't either.
PLOWBOY: What do you mean?
SHUTTLEWORTH: I mean that DDT kills by attacking the nervous system. And polio is a disease of the nervous system. Now I'm not necessarily saying that DDT directly causes polio, but it seems reasonable to me that anyone who breathed as much DDT as my sister and I did that summer might very well be more than ordinarily susceptible to contracting polio.
I'm not the first to have this idea, by the way. I remember some health surveys conducted back in the late 40s and early 50s which turned up the unexpected fact that polio was a lot more common in the so-called "developed" countries — the ones then using DDT — than it was in the undeveloped parts of the world.
At any, rate, I had a lot of time to think about that and other things while I lay in an iron lung and while I was wrapped in scalding "hot packs" — the Sister Kenny treatment — and while I was learning to walk and use my arms again. And while I went through some of the absolutely most painful, physically and emotionally, experiences of my life.
Now this was a pretty big number for an 11-year-old to handle. Especially since I was declared clinically dead at one point when I was in the iron lung. I still have a vague recollection of floating around up near the ceiling someplace and looking down on my body in that machine. I don't know if, as the mystics say, I actually left the physical realm or not, but I figure that, from the age of 11 on, everything has been a gift.
PLOWBOY: Do you have any aftereffects from the polio?
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yeah, I don't have any tricep muscles in my arms; my stomach muscles are pretty well shot; I'm missing some muscles I should have across my back and shoulders; and I've got short hamstrings in both legs.
But you learn to substitute what you do have for what you've lost. I couldn't push bales of hay up on top of a wagon like the other guys after I got out of the hospital, for instance, but I could swing those bales anywhere they needed to go. And I could always work longer and harder than anyone else.
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