Polio - what's that?
For most people in North America their response to a comment on polio is “what?” With the development of the vaccines against this terrible virus in the mid 1950’s the issue of death from paralytic polio, paralyzed limbs, crippled bodies and not being allowed to go to the County Fair for fear of contracting the virus went away. That was not true in the remainder of the world until 1978 when an Italian Rotary Club started a project with clubs in the Philippines that led in 1980 to a half million polio doses being shipped to the Philippines . That model inspired the world wide campaign of Rotary International starting in 1985. On July 23rd District 5580’s Polio Plus Chair Gary Nolte and his wife Cindy talked to the members at their regular noon hour meeting about their experiences with National Immunization Days in African countries and the status of the program worldwide which is that this year there have been very few cases and those have been isolated to northern Nigeria and the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan in addition to an outbreak in previously Polio Free Sudan caused by the virus being transmitted from Nigeria. Once the virus is eliminated from the earth Rotary’s legacy will not only be that people will not contract polio but left in place will be a worldwide microbial surveillance system and local public health microbiology laboratories so that outbreaks of any infectious microbe will be detected and traced early. Rotary International’s partners in this has been the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as well as, more recently, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many national governments. As the polio virus mutates frequently (one of the problems of eliminating it) the risk of not fully eliminating it is that it could return with vengeance as a mutated form. That and the fact that so many children in the United States are not immunized at all will create a public health nightmare.
