One Day - One Focus - Ending Polio
Today is World Polio Day when Rotary around the world marks the progress made to eradicate polio. This year’s re-emergence of Polio cases in the UK, Malawi and Mozambique and the USA underscores the need for eradication and highlights the importance of vaccination as the only form of protection against polio and many other diseases. Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) however remain confident that they are making progress to stop the wild virus forever and can achieve their goal of a polio-free world.
Around 12.5 million children around the world have not received any vaccinations and are vulnerable to being infected. No child should suffer from this vaccine-preventable disease and we have an opportunity to make history with a polio-free world, but we can achieve it only by taking action together.
Join with Rotary on this World Polio Day as polio anywhere is a threat to children everywhere.
Rotary’s perseverance for more than 3 decades has played an enormous role in bringing the world to this point. Rotary launched PolioPlus in 1985 and helped found the GPEI in 1988, with the goal of eradicating a human disease for only the second time in history. When the GPEI was founded, wild poliovirus paralysed hundreds of children every day, with an estimated 350,000 polio cases across more than 125 countries in one year. Since then, cases have plummeted more than 99.9%, sparing more than 20 million people from paralysis. Through a funding partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary commits US$150 million to fighting polio every year and Rotary members have contributed more than US$2.6 billion and countless volunteer hours to this effort encouraging high vaccination rates and helping to immunize more than 400 million children annually.