Participation in this year’s World Polio Day live-streamed event continued the growth registered since it began in 2014.
Rotary, the world’s leading advocacy organization on polio eradication, held this year’s program on 24 October at the headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The event brought some of the biggest names in the campaign together to highlight the progress that has been made and to discuss what further action is needed to end the disease for good.
Here is a summary of this year’s World Polio Day event, by the numbers:
- The streamed program was viewed 100,131 times -- an 86 percent increase over last year’s viewership.
- New this year, more than 170,000 viewers watched a series of Facebook Live videos recorded on-site throughout the day, featuring U.S. Paralympian and polio survivor Dennis Ogbe, Time Editor at large Jeffery Kluger, and Rotary International President John F. Germ.
- Rotary members around the globe registered a total of 1,460 local World Polio Day events at endpolio.org.
- Media coverage doubled compared with last year, with stories in National Geographic, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and People, and on “The Today Show” television program and National Public Radio.
- End Polio Now online donations the week of the event increased by 8 percent over last year, to more than $209,000.
