World Polio Day is on Oct. 24 and Rotary wants to talk about the importance of vaccination. Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) remain confident that they are making progress and can achieve their goal of a polio-free world. We are about to eradicate a human disease on Earth for only the second time. Smallpox was the first one.
Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a disabling and life-threatening disease caused by the poliovirus. The virus spreads from person to person and can infect a person’s spinal cord, causing paralysis.
Rotary members have been at the center of the worldwide effort to eradicate polio for more than three decades. Rotary launched PolioPlus in 1985 and helped found the GPEI in 1988, when there were an estimated 350,000 polio cases across more than 125 countries in one year. Since then, cases have plummeted more than 99.9 per cent, sparing more than 20 million people from paralysis. Rotary has helped immunize nearly 3 billion children against polio, contributed more than US$2.6 billion to global polio eradication efforts, and helped secure more than US$10 billion from donor governments. Through a funding partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary commits US$150 million to fighting polio every year.
As the world gets closer to having zero polio cases that are caused by the wild virus, public health experts have noted the rise of vaccine originated virus. Such cases arise in rare instances when the live but weakened virus contained in oral polio vaccines circulates in areas of low vaccine coverage and mutates back into a dangerous form that can infect people who have not been fully vaccinated.
The recent detections of the poliovirus in an unvaccinated man in New York State and in sewage in London England, have increased awareness of the disease’s continued threat. These findings highlight the importance of vaccinations as the only form of protection against polio.
