On January 17th, at the International Assembly in San Diego, it was announced that we had exceeded the money necessary to fulfill our commitment to the $200 million Polio Plus Challenge. As of that date we had contributed $202.6 million dollars. Congratulations to each and every one of you that has helped us reach this goal. Thank You! Thank you for the billions of children that will never have to face this terrible disease. Thank you for the more than one million children that the CDC estimates would have died from Polio complications if they had not received the vaccine. Thank you for showing the world that when Rotary accepts a challenge we fulfill our obligation.
At the International Assembly, the Gates Foundation presented Rotary with an additional $50 million dollar donation for our Polio program. This is not a challenge grant, but a separate contribution. This makes more than $400 million that the Gates have donated to the fight against polio. The Gates continue to tell the world that they support Rotary’s work in this area, because they believe that nobody will make better use of their money.
Also last week India passed the one year mark with no new polio infections. This is a major milestone in their road to complete eradication. We continue to make progress, last year according to reports I have seen there were only about 650 cases of polio reported around the world. This is an amazing improvement over the more than 350,000 cases of Polio reported when we started this journey. We have come so far, but we are not finished with our job. Until we reach the point where there are NO new cases of Polio, every child is at risk. We are now fighting the reinfection of some areas that were Polio free, this was expected, and we are dealing with these outbreaks. But we cannot stop now. We must finish this job or our more than one billion dollar investment will have been in vain.
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