Fight to consign a killer disease to history

Ian Slim, president of Sowerby Bridge Rotarians remembers vividly at the age of 10 a friend being hospitalised with polio.

"Their arm and leg were badly affected and I still remember it," says Ian, who has just returned from Lucknow in India, where he has helped in the mass immunisation of children.

Ian and his wife were part of a 34-strong UK Rotary team which went to India to help local Rotarians there in a nationwide campaign to immunise about 150 million under-fives.

The UK team, consisted of 23 Rotarians, two Inner Wheel members and nine non-Rotarians from Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, Essex, Merseyside, London, Surrey, Scotland, Wales, Sweden

and Menorca.

Ian was based in Lucknow where 272,295 under-fives received the vital two drops of oral polio vaccine (OPV). This is nearly 9.5 per cent more than in January when 248,637 children were covered.

Children in India have no immunity to polio and so need to receive the vaccine nearly every month.

For Ian and his colleagues this meant assisting the Indian Rotarians manning seven booths throughout the city and administering the vaccine orally as part of an annual day of action organised through Rotary International.

"One of the booths was under a flyover next to a bus stop. The local Rotarian I was with told me not to wait until the children got off the bus, but jump on as soon as it stopped to find the children," explains Ian.

"We gave treats to the children once they had been vaccinated such as balloons and masks, so as soon as they saw us they would just come rushing over. It was quite chaotic at times, but we managed to get them vaccinated.

"It is very satisfying knowing that you have been involved in something like this. Without the vaccination the children would be vulnerable to polio."

In 1985, Rotary launched PolioPlus to eradicate polio and since then, Rotarians have been working with the World Health Organisation and UNICEF to immunise children against the virus. In 1985 it was endemic in 125 countries; now just four countries remain – India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan.

Thanks to national immunisation programmes, two billion children have been protected from the virus, which otherwise would probably have disabled five million and killed 250,000. The number of reported cases has dropped from 350,000 in 1988 to 1,600

in 2008.

The Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates challenged Rotary to raise $200m during the next two-and-a-half years (June 30, 2012) to match-fund the $355m which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated

in the bid to eliminate polio.

The mass immunisation programme is just part of Rotary's Thanks for Life – End Polio Campaign. It is followed up with a week

of fund-raising and awareness events.

"It was interesting when we were collecting on our return. The older people are very generous, but the younger people not so much. They seem to find it hard to understand what a terrible disease it is because they have no experience of it."

Ian hopes to return to India on another vaccination programme in a year or two.

For more information visit www.ribi.org/thanksforlife

POLIO FACTS

Polio is a crippling, and sometimes fatal, disease and a harrowing reality for children in parts of Africa, Asia and India.

Poliomyelitis or polio is a acute viral infectious disease. It is spread through crowding and unclean and insanitary conditions. Thanks to vaccines developed in the middle of the last century, it is rare in first world countries. But a lack of thorough vaccination in developing nations makes polio a recurring problem.

Rotary Clubs work tirelessly throughout the year, raising funds to pay for the Rotary End Polio Now initiative. Since Rotary got involved with the eradication work in 1985, new cases have fallen from 1,000 a day to about 1,500 a year – saving more than 5 million children from being infected.