The humanitarian organization Rotary International is one of the pioneers in the fight against this highly contagious viral disease that has affected humanity since its origins. Contracted through contaminated water due to poor hygiene measures and wastewater management, the wild poliovirus attacks the central nervous system, resulting in paralysis of the lower limbs and the respiratory system.
Under the aegis of the Rotary Foundation, the organization has made it one of its major strategic areas of intervention, as this disease remains a global public health emergency. It launched the PolioPlus program in 1985, mobilizing its network of volunteer members to support massive vaccination campaigns before joining as a founding member of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in 1988.
The objective is nearly achieved with 99.99% eradication across the 5 continents. In August 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the disappearance of “wild” poliomyelitis on the African continent, now limited to the circulation of a single virus (type 1) in two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Confident of being able to completely defeat this disease with one last solidarity campaign, Rotary is actively mobilizing its members across the 5 continents and invites everyone concerned to participate according to their means in this vast global mobilization operation to deploy the use of the type 2 oral polio vaccine (nVPO2) to protect all children and combat the most widespread variants of the remaining strains (notably the type 2 cVDPV).
“It is crucial at this phase to continue funding vaccination, vaccinators, and laboratories that detect the virus wherever it hides and take rapid measures to prevent new cases of paralysis because if polio vaccination efforts were to wane, more than 200,000 children worldwide could be paralyzed by the virus within the next ten years,” estimates Michel Zaffran, WHO Director of Polio Eradication from 2015 to 2020 and head of this 2021 awareness campaign.
