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Polio Pandemic Nears Its End: Highlands Mountaintop Rotary
Written By: Highlands Mountaintop Rotary | Issue: 2020/11 - November
Thanks to heroic efforts here on the Plateau and around the world, polio is close to being consigned to history.
Fortunately, most Americans have never had to worry about polio, but before the Salk vaccine was approved and given to millions of children, parents all over the world worried about their children being paralyzed by this mysterious disease.
Highlands Mountaintop Rotary member Dr. John Baumrucker related his experience with the disease, “I remember when I was 11 years old, before the vaccine came out, my next-door neighbor had a mild case that affected her legs. My mother wouldn’t let me out of the house for weeks.”
Rotary International had the temerity in 1988 to begin a program to eradicate polio in the world. In 1988 200,000 new cases were happening in Asia, South America and Africa and even in Europe every year. When the initiative began, over a thousand children were paralyzed worldwide every day.
Massive efforts to vaccinate all children in countries with active polio began in partnership with WHO and other organizations. Thousands of Rotarian volunteers travelled around the world dripping the vaccine into millions of tiny mouths.
Slowly, countries and regions and then whole continents became polio-free. This year, in August, Nigeria was certified by the CDC to be polio-free, the last bastion of polio in Africa, making another continent that is polio-free.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only countries in the world now that have wild polio cases, but until all cases are eradicated for at least three years, no child is safe.
Due to millions of hours of effort over two decades, we are incredibly close to removing the second illness from the face of the earth, smallpox being the first.
On Saturday, October 24, in commemoration of World Polio Day, The Highlands Mountaintop Rotary Club had a Purple Pinky celebration at Kelsey-Hutchinson Founders Park.
In India, where as many as 172,000,000 children have been vaccinated against polio, each child had his or her little finger painted purple when vaccinated.
Donations to the Polio Fund can be mailed to the Rotary Club of Highlands Mountaintop at PO Box 372, Highlands, NC 28741. A polio-free world is within our grasp, and we hope you will help.
