ROTARY CLUB WALKS IN NEW BERN TO END POLIO

The New Bern Breakfast Rotary Club completed their annual End Polio Now Walk on Sunday, October 26. Beginning at 3:00 from Union Point Park, on a beautiful day, eleven Rotarians, including two representing the New Bern Noon Rotary Club, and four dogs, walked a two-mile route around downtown New Bern.

“This was a great turnout from our local club to bring attention to the need to eradicate Polio from our planet, the signature project of Rotary International since 1985,” said Paul Platek, Rotary Foundation Chair. “We use this End Polio Now Walk each year to bring awareness to the importance of vaccines to prevent this crippling disease as well as to raise the funds necessary to inoculate children in other parts of the world where the active Polio virus still exists,” Platek explained.

A Rotarian for over 24 years, Paul Platek stressed that Polio remains endemic in only two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, recent outbreaks in previously polio-free areas and detections of poliovirus in sewage across several European countries demonstrate that polio remains a threat to children everywhere. Anti-vaccine messages, fragile health systems, and competing priorities continue to challenge eradication efforts, but Rotary and the Gates Foundation have renewed a long-standing partnership to fight polio with the Gates Foundation offering a $2 match for every dollar contributed to Rotary’s PolioPlus Fund, for a joint commitment of $450 million this year.

Today, without the efforts of Rotary International and its partners,19 million people, primarily children, would otherwise be paralyzed by polio and 1.5 million people would have died. If our aggressive eradication efforts stopped today, within 10 years, polio could affect at least 200,000 children or more each year. Rotary’s PolioPlus program, surveillance networks, and vaccination campaigns also monitor children for other health problems like vitamin deficiency and measles, so these diseases can be addressed in a timely manner.

Polio eradication will be one of history’s greatest public health achievements, with polio following smallpox to become only the second human disease eradicated from the world thanks to the science and distribution of vaccines. Today Rotary and its partners have reduced the incidence of polio worldwide by 99.9 percent, but we must not be complacent. Eradication efforts need continued funding to immunize more than 400 million children against polio each year. We must improve our disease surveillance systems to detect any resurgence of the polio virus in a person or environment to minimize its spread. Additionally, we must ensure that more than 150,000 health workers are hired to continue going door-to-door to inoculate every child.

“People have not seen polio in the United States since the mid-1950s, and that’s because of the vaccine we have available to protect our children. We cannot become complacent when we are so close to totally eradicating this terrible disease from our world,” stressed Platek.

Donations may be made online to www.EndPolioNow.org or checks can be mailed to: New Bern Breakfast Rotary, c/o Paul Platek, P. Ol Box 14625 New Bern, NC 28561