Brandon Mayor Jeff Fawcett proclaimed today (Oct 24th) as “Rotary World Polio Day.”
A media release from the Brandon Rotary Club said “in 38 years, Rotary and our partners changed the annual Polio starts from over 450,000 per year and today to less than 100 Polio starts worldwide per year. An unbelievable achievement and the world is on the brink of wiping out Polio. Immunization takes only 2 drops on the tongue of a child to remove their risk of Polio for life.”
The City of Brandon’s Proclamation reads in part that in 1985, “Rotary initiated a campaign to rid the word of Polio and launched the Polio Plus program. Then in 1988, it spearheaded the Global Polio Eradication Initiative with the World Health Organization, U.S. Centre for Disease Control and UNICEF to immunize the children of the world against polio; and Rotary and its partners have reduced the incidence of start cases by 99.9%, from over 450,000 per year to less than 100 per cent worldwide – Canada’s last case of wild polio was 1977.
Rotary has contributed more than $1.3 billion USD and thousands of member hours to immunize over 2.5 billion children worldwide, and Rotary’s advocacy efforts have played a role to motivate donor governments to contribute over $10 billion USD to its Polio Plus campaign.”
