Polio eradication by 2028-29? Goal is within reach

ASHEBORO — Debbie Branson Doby is passionate about eradicating polio from the world.

The Rotary district’s PolioPlus chair spoke fervently on Oct. 21 to Asheboro Rotary about the relay race to zero cases worldwide by 2028-29. “I can feel it,” she said.

Tracing the history of Rotary International’s involvement with the fight against polio, Doby said it was 1979 when The Philippines began a multi-year project to immunize six million children. Rotary International joined the effort with grants to help pay the cost of vaccines.

Then in 1985 Rotary launched PolioPlus, the first and largest internationally coordinated private-sector support of a public health initiative. The initial fundraising goal was $120 million.

In 1988, Rotary International collaborated with the World Health Organization to begin the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, or GPEI. At that time, there were an estimated 350,000 polio cases in 125 countries.

By the year 2000, a record 550 million children, nearly 10 percent of the world’s population, were given the oral polio vaccine. That year the Western Pacific region, from Australia to China, was declared polio-free.

By 2006, the number of polio-endemic countries had dropped to four: Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria — whose initials spell out PAIN, Doby noted, saying, “A polio victim has pain for the rest of their life.”

In 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation joined the cause, pledging $355 million to GPEI. Three years later, India was removed from the list of countries with endemic polio.

“Now we’re down to Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Doby, with seven cases in Afghanistan and 29 in Pakistan. “Afghanistan vaccinated 11 million children in a little over a week. That’s the population of North Carolina.”

With the bar set high, Pakistan went even further, vaccinating 45 million children with the assistance of 400,000 workers, mostly volunteers, Doby said.

In Afghanistan, the government led by the Taliban will only allow women into the country to vaccinate the population, she said.

“It costs money so we gotta keep giving to finish this race in 2028-2029,” said Doby, encouraging Rotarians to commit to $100 per year in the cause to eliminate polio from the world. She said Bill Gates, partnering with Rotary, has said “he’ll give $200 for every $100 and signed up for another three years,” Doby said.

With that encouragement, several Asheboro Rotarians filled out pledge forms.

A PGEI fact sheet said that since 1988, because of the polio eradication effort, “20 million people are walking today who would have otherwise been paralyzed by polio. Three billion children have been immunized against polio. Thanks to current efforts, 150-plus laboratories support disease surveillance and response in many low-income countries. Twenty million health workers and volunteers worldwide help tackle polio.”

According to literature from Doby, despite the reduction in incidence of polio by 99.9 percent, the fight isn’t over. “Until we see the last of the poliovirus, eradication efforts need additional funding to immunize more than 400 million children against polio every year; improve disease surveillance systems to detect any polio-virus in a person or the environment; hire more than 150,000 health workers to go door to door to find every child.”

Even non-Rotarians can donate by going to endpolio.org.