Help eradicate polio worldwide

World Polio Day is on October 24 and to date Rotary and its partners has reduced the incidence of polio by 99.9 per cent.

The public is encouraged to join the fight by making a donation towards helping Rotary in its fight against polio.

At the end of the 1980s, more than 350 000 children were paralysed by polio every year.

Despite the 99.9 per cent reductions, until the last of the poliovirus is seen, eradication efforts need additional funding to:

Immunise: More than 400 million children against polio every year.

Improve: Disease surveillance systems to detect any poliovirus in a person or the environment.

Hire: More than 150 000 health workers to go door to door to find every child.

Polio needs to be eradicated for the following reasons:

• Your gift will improve lives: Today, 19 million people who would otherwise be paralysed by polio are walking and, 1.5 million people who would otherwise have died are alive. 

• Your gift will invest in the future: If all eradication efforts stopped today, within 10 years, polio could paralyse as many as 200 000 children each year. A polio-free world will be a healthier world for children everywhere.

• Your gift will improve child health: Polio surveillance networks and vaccination campaigns also monitor children for other health problems, like vitamin deficiency and measles, so these can be addressed sooner.

• Your gift will lower health care costs: The global effort to eradicate polio has already saved more than $27-billion in health care costs since 1988, and expects to save $14-bil dollars more by 2050.

• Your gift will make history: Polio eradication will be one of history’s greatest public health achievements, with polio following smallpox to become only the second human disease eradicated from the world.

Join the fight in eradicating polio by making a donation at endpolio.org

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