£700 End Polio Now Donation!

Banstead Rotary just donated £700 to End Polio Now! Add Gates Foundation matching funds and it will be worth £2100!

One of the international projects for which Rotary is best known is End Polio Now, a programme to immunise the world’s children against Polio. This was started in 1985.A joint venture Between Rotary, The World Health Organization and Bill Gates Foundation.

At the time, there were 350,000 cases reported in 1985 across 125 countries.

Last year 2022 there were only 30 new cases reported; which were confined to 2 in Afghanistan, 20 in Pakistan & 8 in Mozambique. In 2023, to date, 5 children have been paralyzed by polio! This is a magnificent achievement, but work still continues to consolidate the eradication by continuing vaccination in vulnerable countries.

As people living in Banstead and Rotarians we are very fortunate to live in a country where we are vaccinated as a right, so long as we make the choices to do so!

Please help in this aim, and, help Rotary and its partners keep Rotary’s promise to make sure the last case of Polio is sooner rather than later. Until polio is totally eradicated, every child is at risk of this highly infectious, potentially life-threatening and paralysing disease. There is no cure for polio but there is a safe and effective vaccine. Rotary and our partners continue to give around 2 billion doses of vaccine annually to 450 million children worldwide. If Polio is not eradicated, we could see as many as 200,000 new cases across the world within 10 years. When the world is declared polio free, it will be just the second human disease ever to be eradicated, after smallpox!

If you'd like to know more about Rotary and End Polio Now visit: https://www.rotary.org/en/our-causes/ending-polio