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Rotary members around the world have organized "End Polio" events to raise awareness and donate to the Rotary campaign to eliminate polio now and forever.
Every day in the world, 360,000 babies are born. To be fully protected against polio, each child must be vaccinated, not once, but several times. To prevent the virus from traveling, every child must be fully vaccinated at the same time, before enough children are born to allow the virus to travel again. The only way to achieve eradication is to use the massive and coordinated scale upon which Rotary International, which uses a vast network of systems to deliver approximately 430 million doses of vaccine each year, through mass vaccination campaigns. Such campaigns are deployed in countries such as Africa and Southeast Asia.
Places with great distances, extremely remote communities, wars, instability, poverty and hundreds of millions of children.
The goal is to reach them all. South Africa is currently free of the polio virus, but the risk still exists due to movement and migration of people to South Africa. As polio remains primarily a disease of infants and young children and affects primarily children under five, continued immunization is imperative.
Since Rotary and its partners launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) more than 30 years ago, the incidence of polio has dropped by more than 99, 99%, rising from approximately 350,000 cases per year in 125 countries to only 22 cases in 2017 and only three remaining countries where polio is endemic, namely Afghanista, Pakistan and Nigeria. Stopping polio eradication when 99.9% of cases do not have polio is like moving away from a fire when it is 99.9%. A spark is enough to light a new fire. If Rotary stopped fighting polio, it could see 200,000 new cases of polio each year in the next 10 years. Polio would be a crisis again.
Although tremendous progress has been made, the final stages of any trip are often some of the most difficult. 2018 was difficult, with 14 cases in the first eight months of the year. However, extensive global environmental sampling around the world has made the identification and mobilization against the threats to eradication easier, more focused and often more effective.
This again underscores the challenges the world faces in making polio the second most common human disease ever eradicated.
The end is very near and Rotary is committed to raising $ 150 million between 2017 and 20 to support eradication efforts globally. Rotary has donated more than $ 1.8 billion to end polio since 1985. This is one of Rotary International's best investments in global health. Once polio is fully eradicated, more public health resources will be available to fight diseases such as malaria, HIV / AIDS and cancer.
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