I traveled to Maine last week to meet with an area Rotary International Club and speak about ONE. Earlier this year, ONE and Rotary joined together in a formal collaboration, finding common cause in issue-based education and advocacy. Through the years, Rotary has demonstrated a long commitment to the world’s poorest people and in particular has sought to bring about the eradication of polio in the developing world.
As a result of this collaboration, I joined Tom Leary, from ONE Vote in New Hampshire, to deliver a talk to a local Rotary Club in Scarborough, Maine, located just south of Portland. We were welcomed by club president Leroy P. Crockett as we introduced ONE and the basics of our work and answered many thoughtful questions from club members. Since we started this outreach and have been interacting with local clubs, the invitations to speak have poured in. In fact, Tom had given a similar talk earlier in the day to a Rotary club in Kittery, Maine.
At the meeting in Scarborough, we were also joined by Ann Lee Hussey, a former Rotary District Governor, based in South Berwick, Maine. Ann Lee has led 18 immunization campaigns to countries where polio still threatens children, such as India, Bangladesh, Mali, Niger and Nigeria and is a true champion for those that remain at risk from this disease around the world.
As our collaboration with Rotary becomes more realized, it is exciting to see Rotary’s record of service and a membership core so involved and eager to make a difference in the world. It was great to engage with Rotarians in Maine and I look forward to another opportunity soon.
In just a few minutes, Bruce Aylward, assistant director-general at the World Health Organization for polio eradication will lead a live chat on what it will take to make polio the second disease ever to be eradicated. Dr. Aylward’s TED talk will begin with the questions “How do you get so many different players to agree on something so complex and spread out both in time and geography?” and “Why must polio be eradicated and not simply controlled?”
Tremendous progress has been made towards polio eradication. Polio is endemic in only four countries today, compared to 125 countries in 1988 and since then roughly 2.5 billion children have been vaccinated against polio worldwide. In the same period, the global number of polio cases has been reduced by more than 99 percent, from 350,000 cases a year to under 1000 cases in 2010.
Tune in and be sure to leave any comments or questions you have while watching below or Tweet them directly to me, @RiledupB.
Dr. Muhammad Pate, executive director of Nigeria’s National Primary Healthcare Development Agency, says the country’s polio program has provided the momentum to combat other vaccine-preventable diseases. Read the original post on the Gates Foundation’s Foundation Notes blog.
In Nigeria we have made remarkable progress in the fight against polio, with intense campaigns that drove polio down from 388 cases in 2009 to 21 in 2010 — a 95 percent reduction. We are extremely hopeful that these gains continue, although much hard work remains.
We are seriously LOVING Rotary International’s latest campaign against polio, “This Close.” And we’re not just saying that because they’re our new partner, either. Rotary’s campaign uses celebrity sparkle (Bill Gates, Isabel Allende, Ziggy Marley), social media and cool web tools to draw some much-needed attention to polio, a disease that we’ve come “this close” to eradicating — 99 percent, to be exact.
GOOD Magazine just released a cool infographic on preventing polio. While those of us fortunate to live in developed countries live without the fear of polio and tend to think of it as a thing of the past, polio is still very much alive in about a dozen countries today. This crippling and oftentimes deadly disease causes lifelong pain and great economic burden.
Porter McConnell of Oxfam America shares why World Health Day is important to her…
Today is World Health Day. And the world is on the brink of eradicating polio. It’s hard for most of us to remember that before the polio vaccine, the disease crippled an average of 1,000 children every day. My own father was one of those children. He recovered full use of his legs, thanks to treatments at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute in Georgia, one of the earliest rehabilitation centers in the country.
But few children in developing countries have access to the kind of health facilities my dad did in the rural US. And vaccines are a tricky thing. They need an accessible primary care system to prevent resistance and keep the disease at bay for good. Diseases like polio that we have nearly eradicated have a tendency to reappear again when the global “big push” programs are over.(more...)
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