Clee Hill school joins Ludlow Rotary in battle to end polio
On a foggy day in November pupils from Clee Hill Community Academy braved misty weather to play their part in highlighting efforts to eradicate polio from the world. They helped members of Ludlow Rotary Club to plant over 4,000 crocus corms in the school grounds. When they flower in February next year, they will bring a splash of purple and a reminder of this terrible disease that can kill or seriously disable children.
The purple crocus has long been a symbol of Rotary’s worldwide campaign to bring polio to an end, with its colour representing the dye used to mark the finger of a child who has been immunised.
For 40 years Rotary International has been battling to eradicate polio from the world. When it launched its global campaign to fight the crippling and sometimes deadly disease, more than 350,000 children were being paralyzed by polio every year in 125 countries. Today, as a result of an intensive immunization programme, the incidence of polio has been reduced by 99.9% and the wild polio virus is now only endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan where just 35 confirmed cases have been identified so far this year. Rotary International, along with other agencies, continues to raise funds to bring this devastating and crippling disease to a world-wide end.
Speaking about this initiative, Ludlow Rotary organiser Tom Hunt said: “It’s particularly fitting that Clee Hill School has been helping us in this way. For until polio is totally eradicated, every child is at risk of this highly infectious, potentially life-threatening and paralysing disease. There is no cure for polio but there is a safe and effective vaccine which we need to continue to roll out until there are no more cases. When the world is finally declared polio free, it will be just the second human disease ever to be eradicated, after smallpox.”
For more information about Ludlow Rotary Club and its work, contact secretary@ludlowrotaryclub.org.uk.
