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Polio
Plus
Homepage "Fulfilling Our Promise: Eradicate
Polio"
It was announced at the Scottsdale Rotary Board of
Directors that the members of the club have made our Polio
Plus campaign a complete success.
RCS Members donated in excess of $10,000. Combined
with BILL ARTHUR'S matching funds, this
enabled The Rotary Club of Scottsdale to donate $25,000+ to the R.I.
Foundation for polio eradication. 
Additional thanks go to HAROLD
LARSON for his generous contribution.
This campaign was an awesome
accomplishment in less than one month... undoubtedly a
record.
The intent of the Trustees of the Rotary International
Foundation was to raise $80 million by 2005, in a polio
eradication fundraising campagin that coincided with Rotary's 100th
anniversary.
It was suggested that each club's goal should be 150%
of its normal contribution to the Rotary International Foundation.
If we understand the numbers correctly, Scottsdale Rotary Members
just donated 380%+ of our normal annual giving.
Spectacular!!!
All donations to the campaign are eligible
for Paul Harris Fellowship credit.
Thank you for your support.
Rotary
vs. Polio
FORTUNE
MAGAZINE
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
By
Carol J. Loomis
In the past year members of the Rotary Club in Sedalia, Mo. (pop:
20,339), honored a student of the month at Smith-Cotton High School,
read to first-graders, delivered valentines to patients at Bothwell
Regional Hospital, and helped the city's Hispanics celebrate Cinco
de Mayo. Also, they kept working to eradicate polio worldwide.
Well, the Sedalia club isn't eradicating polio all by
itself--30,000 Rotary Clubs all over the world are helping--and the
job's not quite done. Polio still exists in seven countries:
Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Somalia.
But the incredible fact is that Rotary International, the butt of
stand-up comedians forever, has since the mid-1980s all but wiped
out the disease. When Bill Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation has given billions to advance world health, is asked what
medical projects he respects, he often starts with Rotary and "the
remarkable job it has done with polio."
Years ago every Rotary Club was an island that carried out
service projects on its own. It would have been "close to heresy,"
says Bill Sergeant of Knoxville, Tenn., now Rotary's poliomeister,
for anyone to suggest any other form of operating. But in the late
1970s a visionary Rotary president, Australian Clem Renouf,
persuaded the organization's hierarchy that the clubs were wasting
their talents by not uniting to attack a major problem. Polio was
chosen, and ultimately, in 1986, Rotary announced a drive to raise
the unimaginable amount of $120 million to eradicate the disease.
With that start--and with the $247 million that was actually
raised--PolioPlus was off the ground.
Rotary has now put more than $500 million into PolioPlus and has
gathered billions more from such partners as the World Health
Organization, Unicef, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Gates
Foundation itself. Vaccines are the first cost, of course. Every
child under the age of 5--there are 607 million in the world--needs
to receive at least six doses, at a per-dose cost of around 10
cents. Beyond that expense is the logistical challenge of delivering
the vaccines. The difficulty of getting desperately poor mothers and
children to an immunization center six or more times can't be
underestimated. Rotary takes on much of that work: In war-ravaged
Sudan, for example, it has chartered planes to airlift vaccines and
staff to the inaccessible southern part of the country.
The seven countries where polio still exists each must pass
several tests before they can be declared free of the disease,
including having no cases for three years. (In case you're
wondering, the U.S. has been polio-free since 1993.) Rotarians would
love to see some of the seven graduate by 2005, the organization's
100th birthday. Meanwhile, Renouf is now Sir Clem, knighted for his
humanitarian work in connection with Rotary.
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