Rotary celebrates India’s first polio-free year
By Dan Nixon and Wayne Hearn, Rotary International News
Rotary club members worldwide are cautiously celebrating a major milestone in the global effort to eradicate polio. India, until recently an epicenter of the wild poliovirus, has gone one year without recording a new case of the crippling, sometimes fatal, disease.
Rotarians and state government leaders in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India, vaccinate
children against polio during a National Immunization Day in 2011.
India’s last reported case was a two-year-old girl in West Bengal State on 13
January 2011. The country recorded 42 cases in 2010, and 741 in 2009.
A chief factor in India’s success has been the widespread use of the bivalent
oral polio vaccine, which is effective against both remaining types of the
poliovirus. Another has been rigorous monitoring, which has helped reduce the
number of children missed by health workers during National Immunization Days
to less than 1 percent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Rotary has been a spearheading partner in the Global Polio
Eradication Initiative since 1988, along with WHO, UNICEF, and the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation is also a key supporter of the initiative.
Sporting their signature yellow vests and caps, the nearly 119,000 Rotarians in
India have helped administer vaccine to children, organize free health camps
and polio awareness rallies, and distribute banners, caps, comic books, and
other items.
“With the support of their Rotary brothers and sisters around the world, Indian
Rotarians have worked diligently month after month, year after year, to help
organize and carry out the National Immunization Days that reach millions of
children with the oral polio vaccine,” says RI President Kalyan Banerjee, of
the Rotary Club of Vapi, Gujarat.
“The achievement of a polio-free India for a full year is a significant step
towards a polio-free world -- an example as to what can be accomplished no
matter what problems need to be overcome,” says Robert S. Scott, chair of
Rotary’s International PolioPlus Committee. “Rotarians of India are and should
be proud of the key efforts they have made at all levels, without which
the world would not be marking this milestone.”
Deepak Kapur, chair of the India PolioPlus Committee, also credits the Indian
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for its commitment to ending polio. To
date, the Indian government has spent more than US$1.2 billion on domestic
polio eradication activities. “Government support is crucial if we are to
defeat polio, and we are fortunate that our government is our biggest advocate
in this effort,” Kapur says.
“Marching ahead, the goal is to sustain this momentum,” he adds, describing as
potentially “decisive” the upcoming immunization rounds this month and in
February and March.
If all ongoing testing for polio cases recorded through 13 January continues to
yield negative results, WHO will declare that India has interrupted
transmission of indigenous wild poliovirus, laying the groundwork for its
removal from the polio-endemic countries list, which also includes Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and Nigeria. However, because non-endemic countries remain at risk
for cases imported from endemic countries, immunizations in India and other
endemic and at-risk countries must continue. Neighboring Pakistan, which has
reported 189 cases so far for 2011, is a major threat to India’s continued
polio-free status. Last year, an outbreak in China, which had been polio-free for
a decade, was traced genetically to Pakistan.
“As an Indian, I am immensely proud of what Rotary has accomplished,” Banerjee
says. “However, we know this is not the end of our work. Rotary and our
partners must continue to immunize children in India and in other countries
until the goal of a polio-free world is finally achieved.”