At its peak, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the disease affected between 13,000 and 20,000 people in the United States each year, many of them children. Thousands died. Many others were permanently paralyzed. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that Jonas Salk and then Albert Sabin developed vaccines that stopped polio in its tracks. In the United States, by 1960, the number of cases dropped to 2,525.
Globally, however, the disease continued to run rampant. Rotary took on the cause in October 1985, the 40th anniversary of the United Nations. It pledged an extraordinary $120 million to fund the Polio Plus program, a commitment to vaccinate every child in the world against polio. Three years later, Rotary had more than doubled that amount – and declared its intent to rid the world of the disease.
This is the biggest project Rotary has ever done. It shows, too, that we are not just a service club but have partnered with international agencies, like WHO and the United Nations.” Along with the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have joined Rotary as spearheading partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
Although the initiative has slashed the number of polio cases by 99 percent over the past two decades, the wild poliovirus still persists in four countries: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Polio cases represented by that final 1 percent are the most costly to prevent, due to geographical isolation, poor public infrastructure, armed conflict, cultural barriers, and other factors.
