Weald Rotarians put on a display in support of End Polio Now and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative at the Maidstone CAN repair café. We were able to borrow a child-sized iron lung from Medway Sunlight Rotary Club, which attracted a lot of attention.
Polio is a disease, transmitted through contaminated water which can cause irreparable damage to the central nervous system, leading to paralysis, usually of the legs but can affect the diaphragm and cause problems with breathing. The iron lung was a mid-20th-century solution but frightening in operation. Most of those we spoke to knew little about polio, which was eradicated from the UK in the early 1970s, but some our older visitors remembered it.
Rotary International has been at the forefront of the campaign to eliminate polio since 1985, with End Polio Now, impressing the WHO sufficiently to start the GPEI (Global Polio Eradication Initiative) in 1988 – Rotary is the major private-sector partner and is backed up by double-match-funding from the Gates Foundation. In 1985 there were estimated to be 350,000 new case per year (one every 90 seconds); so far in 2026 there have only been 10, and only two countries (Pakistan and Afghanistan) still have wild poliovirus.
More information at https://www.endpolio.org/