Visit the Wakefield-Wake Forest Rotary booth during Meet in the Street to learn more. And just read the rest of this article to see why a purple pinkie is important.
Polio is a crippling and potentially fatal disease. Fortunately, although incurable, polio is easy to prevent.
A child can be vaccinated for just about 80 cents, protecting the child against this terrible disease for life.
Through one of the world’s biggest immunization programs, polio has been 99 per cent eradicated – so this is one last push to destroy the disease for good.
Why is it called Purple Pinkie? When a child is vaccinated, they have a purple stamp put on their little finger, to prevent a double dose. By supporting the Purple Pinkie campaign, you can help make the pain and life-limiting effects of polio a thing of the past.
The local Wakefield/Wake Forest Rotary Club are helping raise funds and bring community awareness to this project, by asking our children to help children. In exchange for a donation of $1, each child will have their pinkie colored purple. Before the ink dries, they can add their fingerprint to our board, and then display their Purple Pinkie to their friends to show they made a contribution. So each Purple Pinkie brings us closer to making polio history.
Polio has not been a problem in the United States for many years, but this is not the case in many other countries. In 1988 Rotary International, the world’s largest service organization, began raising funds to eliminate polio worldwide, and to date, Rotary has raised over $1.2 billion through our PolioPlus program.
By partnering with the World Health Organization and other government and private groups, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary International has achieved a 99 percent reduction of polio worldwide and we are on course to eradicate polio in the world by 2018. When we started, polio existed in 125 countries and today it exists in only three – Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Why are we concerned about Polio
Few people under the age of 50 have had any direct knowledge or experience of polio, which was one of the most dreaded childhood diseases of the twentieth century until vaccination became possible in the late 1950s.
Polio has been known about for centuries, but it only became a major problem in the twentieth century, when improved sanitation led to a reduction in the natural immunity that people had developed in earlier years. Outbreaks of polio reached pandemic proportions in Europe and North America, and the worst outbreak in U.S. history came in the 1950 epidemic when 3,145 people (mostly children) died, and 21,000 were left with paralysis.
Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus. It invades the nervous system and can cause irreversible damage in a matter of hours. Polio can strike at any age, but it mainly affects children under five years old. Polio is spread through person-to-person contact. When a child is infected with wildpoliovirus, the virus enters the body through the mouth and multiplies in the intestine. It is then shed into the environment through the faeces where it can spread rapidly through a community, especially in situations of poor hygiene and sanitation. If a sufficient number of children are fully immunized against polio, the virus is unable to find susceptible children to infect, and dies out.
Young children who are not yet toilet-trained are a ready source of transmission, regardless of their environment. Polio can be spread when food or drink is contaminated by faeces. There is also evidence that flies can passively transfer poliovirus from faeces to food.
Most people infected with the poliovirus have no signs of illness and are never aware they have been infected. These symptomless people carry the virus in their intestines and can “silently” spread the infection to thousands of others before the first case of polio paralysis emerges. One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs. This is caused by the virus entering the blood stream and invading the central nervous system. As it multiplies, the virus destroys the nerve cells that activate muscles. The affected muscles are no longer functional and the limb becomes floppy and lifeless.
More extensive paralysis can result in quadriplegia. In the most severe cases (bulbar polio), poliovirus attacks the nerve cells of the brain stem, reducing breathing capacity and causing difficulty in swallowing and speaking. Among those paralyzed, 5 percent to 10 percent die when their breathing muscles become immobilized.
Some of those affected are able to survive only after being placed in an “iron lung”, an airtight metal container that encloses the whole body except the head, and forces the lungs to inhale and exhale through regulated changes in air pressure. Martha Mason lived in an iron lung in Lattimore, N.C. for 61 years, until she died in 2009. Others were less crippled, but as I was growing up, it was common to see people in leg braces and other complicated contraptions that allowed them to walk, after their legs become deformed.
To add to the horror, between a quarter and a half of those who survive paralytic polio develop post- polio syndrome, a slow progressive disease, decades later.
There is no cure for polio, but it can be prevented by immunization.
Following the development of vaccines in the 1950s, polio has become rare in the industrialized world.
In 1988, the Rotary Foundation, in partnership with the World Health Organization and UNICEF, started the global effort to eradicate this horrible disease. Since then, the number of polio cases has decreased from 350,000 in 1988 to less than 223 in 2013. But we cannot stop. Last year, an outbreak in the Horn of
Africa affected 214 children.
50 Years Ago
Before the polio vaccine was introduced in 1955, every summer brought new fears to North Carolina. Through repeated outbreaks in the 1940s and early 1950s, public swimming pools were shut down to discourage the spread of the virus. Movie theaters banned children, and families stuck close to home. The opening of school was delayed until summer outbreaks died down.
In March 1964, Wake County conducted a mass “Stop Polio” immunization program to immunize everyone in the county, and wipe out this terrible disease. Fifty years later, we are this close to eliminating it from the few remaining parts of the world where it still exists.
For more information check out http://www.endpolio.org and http://www.polioeradication.org/dataandmonitoring/poliothisweek.aspx
