Rotary After Hours 10.20.2021 - Polio Plus presentation
Rotary After Hours meeting October 20, 2021
We had another wonderful meeting at the Sunset Grill. Attending was Denise, Paul, Ken, Steve, Mike Carrier and his wife Linda, Lisa, Nancy and Sharon.
We started off with a special Paul Harris Fellowship presentation by Ken to Mike Carrier. Mike is in the Paul Harris Society and received a ruby pin this year. A Paul Harris Society member is committed to making a $1,000 donation to Rotary Foundation every year. Congratulations Mike!
Denise updated us that on February 22, 2022 will be the Rotary Speech Contest. We are looking for high school age students to enter the contest. There is real money for the winner. Denise will be reaching out to the High School to encourage their students to enter.
Raffles: 50/50 was won by Denise and Lisa had a chance at the card game but missed the 6 of diamonds. The card game pot has grown to $430 with 37 cards left in the deck.
Paul Brochu is the current District Polio Plus chair and did a great information presentation to us. October 24th is World Polio Day. Many clubs in Rotary do a special event each year to raise funds and bring attention to the world’s polio cases and programs to eradicate it.
What is Polio? It is a viral disease Poliomyelitis and is spread by fecal contamination of food or water; or via droplets from cough and sneeze. Polio can be prevented by vaccine but is not curable. Most cases are asymptomatic, 1 of 200 infections lead to paralysis and 5 to 50% of those paralyzed die.
There are two vaccines – an oral polio vaccine (Sabin) and is a weakened virus and there is a risk of paralysis, it is useful in mass immunizations. An injectable (Salk) polio vaccine is “inactivated” and no risk of paralysis.
Rotary is promoted the oral vaccine, because of mass immunization programs going on all over the world. Many country’s that have polio under control are going to injectable, such as India, but not easy to administer in large numbers.
1978 Rotary turned to Health, Hunger & Humanity and discovered they can help attack Polio. In 1979 the first grant to immunize 6 million children in the Philippines was awarded. 1985 the plan to eradicate became PolioPlus and expanded the program worldwide and included other immunizations, such as measles, mumps and rubella. These vaccines could be administered all at once. Now, today, Covid, is on the Plus side.
1988 Rotary connected to World Health Organization, CDC and Unicef and started a Global Polio eradication program.
Since 1979 Polio has been reduced by 99.99%, in 2014 India and entire WHO southeast Asia region was polio free, and August 25, 2020 Nigeria and African region declared polio free. A country must have no new cases in 4 years to be considered polio free.
Today there is 1 wild polio case in Afghanistan and 1 wild polio case in Pakistan.
Because of new conflicts in these countries it is hard to determine what will happen. So far it seems the Taliban in Afghanistan are supportive of Polio immunizations. Most healthcare workers are women who administer the vaccines. It is very dangerous work for these women working in the middle east.
Rotary still needs to do 400 million immunizations worldwide per year.
Go to endpolio.org and turn your donation into multiples because of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who matches 3 to 1. Rotary raises $50,00,000 and it turns into $150,000,000 because of this Foundation.
There is only 2 wild cases left and its possible to beat Polio and eradicate it from the earth.
What can we do to help? Our District Governor, Mike Carrier has opened a fundraising page: https://go.rotary7850gives.org/polio21/Campaign/Details . Go to this page and make your donation today!
Thank you