One day, one focus, ending polio

Rotary members throughout the world held ‘End Polio’ events to raise awareness and donations for the Rotary campaign to End Polio Now and forever.

There are 360,000 babies born every single day in the world. To be fully protected against polio, each of the children must be vaccinated, not just once, but several times. To stop the virus from travelling, every child must be fully vaccinated all at the same time, before enough new children are born to allow the virus to travel again. The only way to achieve eradication is through the massive and coordinated scale on which Rotary International is now working by using a vast network of systems to deliver about 430 million doses of vaccine every year, via mass immunisation campaigns. Such campaigns are being rolled out in places such as Africa and southeast Asia.

Places with vast distances, incredibly remote communities, wars, instability, poverty and hundreds of millions of children.

The aim is to reach them all. South Africa is presently free of the polio virus, however the risk is still there due to the movement and migration of people to South Africa. As Polio remains primarily a disease of infants and young children as it mainly affects children under the age of five years old, continued immunisation is imperative.

Since Rotary and its partners launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) over 30 years ago, the incidence of polio has plummeted by more than 99.99%, from about 350,000 cases a year in 125 countries to just 22 cases in 2017 and with just three remaining polio-endemic countries i.e Afghanista, Pakistan and Nigeria. Stopping polio eradication when 99.9% is polio free, would be like walking away from a fire when it is 99.9% out. One spark is enough to start a new fire. If Rotary stopped work on polio now, Rotary would see 200,000 new cases of polio every year within 10 years. Polio would be a crisis again.

Whilst tremendous progress has been made, the final steps on any journey are often some of the hardest and 2018 has been far from easy, with 14 cases in the first eight months of the year. However, extensive global environmental sampling around the world has made highlighting and mobilising against threats to eradication easier, more targeted and often more effective.

This re-emphasises the challenges facing the world to ensuring that polio becomes just the second human disease ever to be eradicated.

The end is very much in sight and Rotary has committed to raising US $150 million between 2017-20 in support of global eradication efforts. Rotary has contributed more than US$1.8 billion to ending polio since 1985 – It is one of the best investments made by Rotary International in global health. Once polio is fully eradicated, more public health resources will become available to fight diseases like malaria, HIV/AIDS, and cancer.