Club News

C2S EndPolio is a group of young professionals training to compete in the City to Surf 2012

With only 4 1/2 months from our April 1st launch until the race, it’s going to be a hard slog for these incredibly unfit “Nannas” to train up and raise as much money for End Polio Now as possible.

Poliomyelitis is an acute, viral, infectious disease affecting children. It is spread from person to person, affecting the central nervous system. Polio causes paralysis, pain, fever, seizures and spastic paralysis, and leads to lifelong deformity, paralysis and pain. There is no cure.

While the current vaccine was invented in 1955 and the developed world is largely Polio-free today, Polio was still endemic in the developing world due to limited access, funding, administration and regional conflicts.

In 1988, Rotary World President Royce Abbey (Melbourne, Australia) announced a global effort in conjunction with the World Health Organisation and UNICEF to eradicate Polio. Already the program has overcome obstacles of distance, access, co-ordination, religion, politics and booming populations to eradicate Polio in the Americas, Europe and the West Pacific. The number of annual diagnosed cases have been reduced by 99%; from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to around 1,000 per year now.

After 3 years with no new cases, a country can be officially declared Polio-free. This means the vaccination and follow up boosters of all children under the age of 10. With a global birthrate of 252 children per minute, this is an exponentially challenging administrative and volunteer effort to maintain. Despite being certified Polio-free in 2001, an outbreak was confirmed in China in September 2011 involving a strain of Poliomyelitis prevalent in neighbouring Pakistan.

The push to finally eradicate Polio must be amplified. The last 3 countries with a total 650 new cases of Polio every year are Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. With increasing travel and globalisation, if Polio is not eradicated now, the virus will become globally endemic again within our lifetimes.

C2S EndPolio is a Rotary Foundation project of Ryde Rotary Club.

Rotarians have significant reasons to celebrate Rotary’s 107th anniversary on 23 February.

Major gains have been made in the fight to eradicate polio, Rotary’s top priority. In January, India reached a historic milestone by marking a full year without recording a new case of polio. The country has been an epicenter of the crippling childhood disease.

Worldwide, fewer than 650 polio cases were confirmed for 2011, less than half the 1,352 infections reported in 2010. Overall, the annual number of polio cases has plummeted by more than 99 percent since the initiative was launched in 1988, when polio infected about 350,000 children a year. More than 2 billion children have been immunized in 122 countries, preventing 5 million cases of paralysis and 250,000 deaths.

Also in January, Rotary leaders announced that Rotary clubs raised more than US$200 million in response to a $355 million challenge grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In recognition of Rotary’s commitment, the Gates Foundation contributed an additional $50 million. All of the resulting $605 million will be spent in support of immunization activities in polio-affected countries.  

 “We’ll celebrate this milestone, but it doesn’t mean that we’ll stop raising money or spreading the word about polio eradication,” Rotary Foundation Trustee John F. Germ told Rotary leaders at the International Assembly in San Diego, California, USA. “We can’t stop until our entire world is certified as polio-free.” 

End Polio Now lightings
In what has become a Rotary anniversary tradition, Rotary clubs around the world are illuminating iconic structures with the End Polio Now message.

This year, light displays center on Pakistan, where Rotary clubs will illuminate Frere Hall in Karachi and the WAPDA House in Lahore. Other lighting sites include the Tower of London; City Government Building in Taipei, Taiwan; Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, Tokyo’s fifth tallest building; Federation Square, one of southern Australia’s top tourist draws; and two famous landmarks in Brazil -- the historic Sitio Arqueológico de São Miguel das Missões in Rio Grande do Sul, and the Palácio Garibaldi, a neo-classical architectural treasure in Curitiba.

 The lightings “carry Rotary’s pledge to end polio,” says RI President Kalyan Banerjee, a native of India. “But we are not there yet. Rotary and our partners will continue to immunize children until our goal of a polio-free world is achieved. ”

In a visit to Africa’s most populous nation, Bill witnessed remarkable progress against polio, with lessons for the fight against infectious diseases worldwide.

With continued hard work and investment the world is on a path toward something pretty incredible, the eradication of polio.  In the past two decades, polio cases around the world have been reduced by 99 percent.  If we can get rid of the last one percent, polio will become the second major infectious disease, after smallpox, that has ever been completely eliminated.  There are still gaps in funding for polio eradication, and new outbreaks could reverse some of the progress made so far.  But if polio is eliminated, never again will a child be crippled by this terrible virus.

We have a chance to get there because of some great efforts, particularly by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which involves the World Health Organisation, Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).  Our foundation is very involved in supporting polio immunisation campaigns and other efforts to educate parents and communities about the importance of immunisation.  We’re also supporting work to improve polio surveillance and to develop better vaccines and anti-poliovirus drugs.  

Northern India and northern Nigeria are two areas where polio continues to be a problem.

I visited northern India in May this year to see the progress there.  I was very excited to visit northern Nigeria in June, because the progress there since my last visit in February 2009 has been especially impressive.  As of 14 July, only five cases due to wild polio viruses were reported in Nigeria this year, versus hundreds last year.  I spent most of my first day in Kano, one of the northern states most vulnerable to polio.  I met with community leaders, visited a local health centre and stopped in at an informal school where students study the Koran in Arabic.

On the streets and most everywhere else we went, I noticed so many young children around.  Nigeria has more people by far than any other African country, and more than 40 percent of them are under the age of 15.  That makes polio immunisation a big challenge.  Kano had just begun a campaign to immunise more than 6 million children under the age of five.
  Part of the challenge is overcoming fear and suspicion.  In Kano in the past, false rumors linked immunisation to sterility and HIV.  Community leaders told me that because polio vaccine is free and brought to people in their homes, some people think there must be something wrong with it.

Community leaders play a critically important role in helping to overcome mistrust, and a big focus of anti-polio efforts is on informing these leaders and enlisting their support.  Another ironic thing I noticed was that because polio cases have been dramatically reduced, it’s more difficult to know whether local immunisation campaigns are reaching everyone they need to reach, particularly sub-populations that may be more at risk.  Without many actual cases, you have to rely on other ways of monitoring immunisation rates, and the different measures are sometimes quite inconsistent.  I think we need to look at how to help get more reliable data to guide our efforts and ensure they’re effective.

Also of concern is the risk that progress against polio in Kano might be undermined by the virus filtering back in from neighbouring countries and other parts of northern Nigeria.  Increasingly, the problem needs to be approached on a regional basis.  The school we visited was very interesting.  It didn’t really look like a school.  There were no classrooms, just children sitting on the street, against a wall or under a tree, holding slates with Arabic script written on them.  I asked one of the boys to recite the lesson from his slate, and he did.
  That night in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, I had dinner with government officials including the Minister of Health, Onyebuchi Chukwu.

It was interesting to learn about some of the creative approaches being used to inform Nigerians about the importance of immunisation.  Pro-immunisation messages are being embedded in the plot-lines of popular TV entertainment programs, for example.  One of Nigeria’s largest mobile phone service providers has agreed to send out about 25 million free text messages on polio and health.  The next day I had a number of meetings including a session with several state governors and one with Nigeria’s new President, Goodluck Jonathan.

Commitment from Nigeria’s leaders has been crucial in advancing the nation’s fight against polio.  

A recurring theme I picked up from the people I talked to was the importance of using what we’ve learned and accomplished in the drive against polio to fight other illnesses such as infant diarrhoea, respiratory ailments and malaria.  I do believe that polio eradication helps strengthen routine immunisation, which has the potential to save the lives of large numbers of children.  Wherever I go, I always find that saving children’s lives is a universal concern.

I was very impressed with Nigeria’s progress against polio.  I tried to encourage everyone to not let up.

Bill Gates – from http://www.thegatesnotes.com