Polio Plus

Rotary International has been at the forefront of Polio eradication and we are now nearly at the finish line.  With only two countries left in the world reporting Polio cases this year, and with one of the three strains of the virus no longer found anywhere in the world outside of a research laboratory, the decades of hard work are paying off.  

The eradication of polio is the Number 1 priority of Rotary International, the umbrella agency that supports and manages Rotary clubs around the world, including our club here in the Commack-Kings Park area. Rotary’s project to eliminate the dreaded disease which paralyzes and kills children and adults started in the late 1970’s in the Philippines. By the 1980’s Rotary had joined with several partners, including the Unicef, The World Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to make polio eradication a reality. When our work began, the world was seeing approximately 350,000 new cases of polio every year. Today, through the efforts of Rotary and its partners, we have had fewer than 100 cases in each of the past two years, and those cases were confined to Pakistan and Afghanistan alone. But the job won’t be done until there are no new cases, and Rotary is working tirelessly to provide vaccinations and support to the operation and will do so until the very last case has been registered. The Rotary Club of Commack-Kings Park, through the generosity of its members, provides financial contributions every year to The Rotary Foundations’ polio eradication fund, and volunteer members of our club and other nearby Rotary clubs have gone overseas to administer vaccines to children in far-off places, in remote villages around the world. As of the end of July, 2016, only 19 cases had been reported world-wide for 2016, so it’s safe to say we are very close to making polio only the second disease (after smallpox) to be eradicated from the face of the earth. For more information about Rotary’s efforts to eradicate polio, please see: http://www.endpolio.org