Purple Pinkie People Fight Against Polio
Posted by Dave Tilley
on Mar 19, 2013
As
Rotary International celebrated its 108th anniversary (Feb. 23rd)
Rotarians around the world are stepping up to finish the job they began in 1988,
the eradication of polio.
In 2012,
222 polio cases were reported across the world, down from the 650 cases
reported in 2012. India marked its
second year without polio on January 13th. Overall, the incidence of polio has decreased
more that 99 percent since the Global Eradication Initiative was launched in
1088. At that time polio infected about
350,000 children a year. Now the wild
poliovirus is only endemic in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria, and Rotarians are determined to wipe out the scourge of this
horrible disease once and for all.
On
February 23rd, members of the BEL Rotary Club launched the Purple
Pinkie campaign at the Foodland in Lakefield and Bowles Valu-mart in
Bridgenorth. In developing countries,
the pinkie finger of children who are immunized is marked with indelible purple
dye, as a way of tracking the immunization process, hence the “purple pinkie”.
