DISCURSOS - Rotary International

Polio Update
Bruce Aylward
Assistant Director-General
World Health Organization
Ladies and gentlemen, six months ago, President-elect Ron wrote to me with a tantalizing invitation.
He asked, “Bruce, would you like to meet the Rotary leadership team that will finish polio
eradication?”
So the first thing I need to know is, am I in the right place? Is this the team that will lead the
completion of polio eradication?
Well Ron, that was a pretty tepid response, but I think I understand why.
Rotary did the easy part of polio eradication many years ago, and now you’ve just finished the
hard part. The truth is, our incoming governors only have the nearly impossible part to finish!
So today I’m going to explain why you can now — finally — finish the nearly impossible part of
polio eradication.
Let’s start with some proof that Rotarians are up to this task. Let’s start with 13 January.
Does anyone know why 13 January should be one of the most important dates in the Rotary
calendar? (No, it’s not because that’s the day this assembly started.)
13 January 2011 was the date that this beautiful young girl, Rukhsar Khatoon, was the last child
ever to be paralyzed by polio in India.
That was just 12 months after some “world experts” were quoted in leading newspapers as saying
it’s impossible to eradicate polio from India.
So if you are still wondering whether Rotary can actually do the nearly impossible part of polio
eradication this year, just ask the Rotary leadership in India and the over 100,000 other Indian
Rotarians who helped make India polio free. They have proven that Rotarians are all about doing
the impossible.
And as you head out to lead the nearly impossible part of polio eradication, you will not be alone.
Rotary’s persistence and perseverance in India had a profound effect on the world: Within just
three months, the World Health Assembly declared that completing polio eradication was now an
emergency for global public health, obligating the world’s leaders, and our organizations, to pull
out all the stops to finish the job. WHO, UNICEF, and CDC activated our emergency operations
centers to enhance our speed and coordination.
The last three endemic countries immediately began sharing and applying the lessons learned in
India, and WHO and UNICEF deployed more than 5,000 additional polio workers to the toughest
areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria to help.
In September, the UN secretary-general himself called together the presidents of Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and Nigeria, with the Rotary Foundation chairman and the leaders of our other partners,
to ensure that all countries and partners were giving this emergency the resources and oversight
needed to succeed.
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