End Polio Now

Many people don't realise that the Rotary organization, the world's largest voluntary service group, is instrumental in the campaign to eradicate Polio worldwide.

Rotary's involvement started in 1979 with the campaign to buy and help deliver polio vaccine to more than six million children in the Philippines.  Then in 1985, it launched PolioPlus, the first and largest internationally coordinated private-sector support of a public health initiative, with an initial pledge of US$120 million. 

By 1988 Rotarians had raised US$247 million for PolioPlus, more than double their initial fundraising goal.  In this same year, the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to eradicate polio, setting up the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.  This Initiative leads the fight to end Polio and includes Rotary International, UNICEF, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other supporting organizations around the world.

As Bill Gates stated in his lecture on the BBC earlier in February, 2012, Rotary is  a service organization which has been at the forefront of the campaign to rid the world of Polio.  Rotary International has raised over US$1,000,000,000 to equal the contribution by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  In January 2009, this Foundation pledged US$355 million and issued Rotary a challenge to raise a further US$200 million which becomes known as Rotary's $200 Million Challenge. This would result in a combined US$555 million contribution to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Rotary reached its $200 Million target in 2012, more than five months earlier than planned.

This global campaign has seen the number of countries with endemic Polio worldwide drop from 125 to just 3 -- Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, and the number of infected children has dropped by 99% from 350,000 a year in 1988 to approximately 300 in 2012.

The Rotary Club of Billericay raises contributions to the End Polio Now campaign and works to publicize the campaign and the need for continuing donations.  The efforts of club Communications Chairman Trevor Bond have recently lead to a double page spread in the local newspaper, the Gazette, on the EndPolio Now campaign.  This can be seen by clicking on the Gazette's logo below.

Key Points are:

• Club member Dr Gupta launched our club's initiative in 1987 by holding curry evenings at his house following the start of Rotary International's campaign two years earlier.

• Another member, Peter Strong, has personal interest in the campaign because he contracted Polio as a child, and it was responsible for the sad death of his mother.

• Club Vice-President Keith Wood added that a lot of people are unaware that Rotary International are instrumental in getting rid of Polio worldwide!.