Rotary clubs to sponsor polio walk
By From staff reports
Published in News on September 20, 2015 1:50 AM
The Rotary clubs of Wayne and Greene counties will sponsor the second annual 5K Polio Walk at Wayne Community College on Saturday, Oct. 10, starting at 9 a.m.
Rotarians are currently seeking sponsors for the walk. All money raised from the event go to fight the crippling children's disease. Anyone who wants to sponsor a walker, or walk themselves, is asked to contact any Rotarian for more information.
In 1985 Albert Sabin challenged Rotary International to eradicate polio. The Salk and Sabin vaccines had proven highly effective in preventing the disease. But there were still 350,000 new cases each year, mostly in the developing world, with 6,000 deaths.
Rotary had already proven that it was possible with a successful eradication effort in the Philippines. So Rotary committed itself to raising money, providing the manpower for massive immunization days, and partnering with the World Health Organization, the CDC, national health ministries, and numerous non-governmental organizations including the Gates Foundation.
The struggle has been very expensive. Rotary alone has raised $1.6 billion dollars and the total world expenditures now exceed $10 billion dollars. But that effort has been proven incredibly successful.
The last case of wild polio in the Americas occurred over 20 years ago, India is in its fourth year with no new cases, and Africa has been free of polio for a year.
Conflict areas have been the most difficult. Polio workers have been killed delivering vaccine. Yet in spite of this, the only locations in the world with wild polio today are in Afghanistan, where there has been only one new case so far this year, and in Pakistan,where there have been a few dozen cases.
In 2012 the World Health Organization declared a world health polio emergency.
The WHO feared that the virus would re-emerge in parts of the world convulsed by conflict or that had become complacent about vaccination. This declaration redoubled the efforts and greatly increased the funding.
The struggle will not be won until the world has had no new cases for three years.