Campaigners celebrate Africa being declared polio-free

Tuesday 01 September 2020

Two Rotary Clubs in Jersey are celebrating Africa being officially declared free of polio after a 30-year campaign that raised £150,000 towards global efforts to eradicate the debilitating disease.

The World Health Organization’s Africa region is the last of their six regions to be officially certified as wild polio-free. The certification comes four years after Nigeria, the last polio-endemic country in Africa, recorded its final case of wild polio.

Five of the WHO's six regions, which include Africa, the Americas, South-East Asia, Europe, Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Pacific, account for 90% of the world's population – are now free from polio.

Polio is a disease mainly affecting children, which can cause paralysis and even death. Rotary clubs across the UK, along with thousands of volunteers, have worked tirelessly over the years to rid the world of this disease.

The two Rotary Clubs in Jersey have played their part by fundraising events, school awareness and participation in National Polio Immunisation Days in India, which helped secure India's freedom from polio in 2012. Together, the Rotary Club of Jersey and Rotary de la Manche have raised over £150,000 since campaigning to eradicate polio began in 1986.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation matches each dollar raised by Rotary with two. So Jersey's contribution became the equivalent of £450,000.

Each polio immunisation costs 60 cents, meaning Jersey has paid for close to one million children in the world to be protected against polio.

Pictured: There is no time to check individual health records when a child has been treated for polio, so the little finger of the left hand is painted with a purple dye. The 'Purple Pinkie' has become an emblem of the contribution Rotary has made to the eradiction of polio from the world.

Globally, thanks to the Rotary End Polio Now campaign, more than 2.5 billion children have been protected against the disease, which has reduced the number of cases from around 350,000 annually in 1986 across 125 countries to less than 200 cases per year in just 2 countries in 2019.

Rotarian Tony Allchurch, holder of the Rotary Regional Service Award for a Polio-Free World, said: "This is an exciting landmark in the global campaign to eradicate polio. Although it has been many years since polio has been present in the UK, we are proud to have contributed to the global efforts to eliminate the disease for good.

"We remain committed to completing the final, challenging steps towards eradicating this dreaded childhood disease and making a polio-free-world a reality."

Rotary plans to continue vaccination programmes in order to sustain this progress, protect every last child and strengthen routine immunisation to keep immunity levels high. For the time being, due to the covid-19 pandemic, the global infrastructure for polio eradication has temporarily ceased to provide support and expertise to aid communities facing the challenge of the new pandemic.

Pictured top: Rotary Club of Jersey's Tony Allchurch (centre top) on a visit to Saharanpur in Utter Pradesh, India, when he participated in a National Immunisation Day in 2009. At the time the photo was taken, Tony and the vaccination team were preparing to tour a district to check for any children that had not been treated.