*EPF209 11/16/2004
Americans Head to Africa for Polio Immunization Campaign
(Rotary International service club is a key partner in polio eradication) (1070)

By Charlene Porter
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- For the second time in as many months, health care workers and volunteers in Western and Central Africa are preparing for an ambitious five-day campaign in which they will attempt to vaccinate 80 million children in 23 nations against polio.

During the November 18-22 events known as National Immunization Days (NIDs), workers will go door to door, village to village, to find every child and make sure he or she is vaccinated to prevent this crippling childhood disease. This canvassing approach has been a hallmark of the 16-year struggle to rid the world of polio, known as the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). The cause is jointly supported by the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.N. Children's Fund and the humanitarian service organization Rotary International.

David Groner, an American member of Rotary International from Dowagiac, Michigan, is in Benin to assist with the upcoming National Immunization Days, and he brings significant experience to the task. He has traveled to India or Western Africa twice a year for the last six years to help out in the vaccination campaigns.

"The organization, the distribution, the finding of children, the feeding, watering and collecting volunteers is a massive organization effort. You're doing it with volunteers of multiple languages, and it works," said Groner in a Washington File interview conducted before he left for Benin. "You know why? Because everybody wants healthy children, everybody wants a better community."

Groner's most recent trip in the cause of polio eradication was to northern India. Working with Hindus and Sikhs, Americans, Indians and Rotarians of other nationalities, Groner was part of a team that helped vaccinate 34 million youngsters over a three-week period in February.

Back in Dowagiac, Groner, 61, owns a funeral home. He does not bring special epidemiological skills to the NIDs. He just wants to be an extra pair of hands.

"I like children, I really do," Groner said. "I think it's inexcusable that children, no matter where they live, are not protected from the polio virus. We can live in a polio-free world and we can have healthier children if we make a mindset to do it."

Groner is only one of 150 Rotary Club members from the United States, Canada, France, Denmark, Australia and the United Kingdom who will join thousands of local Rotarians in India and West Africa for NIDs this month. Approximately 1.2 million people worldwide are devoted to the club's mission of humanitarian service in 31,000 local branches in 166 countries.

In the 1980s, before the United Nations or the United States became involved, Rotarians had the vision to undertake global eradication of polio, a disease that had largely disappeared in the developed world with the availability of vaccine but remained a parent's nightmare in developing countries.

"It was Rotary, really, that showed the way," said Dr. David Heymann, WHO executive director for communicable diseases. "[Rotary] took the world into this polio eradication initiative because of their humanitarian desires to see that children everywhere had access to polio vaccines as did children in industrialized countries."

It has been some 16 years since GPEI was established, and Heymann told the Washington File that Rotary has maintained its leadership role. He recalled a discussion of preparations for a recent immunization campaign in India.

"Every time there was a gap -- such as a lack of vehicles or a lack of social mobilization material -- Rotary [representatives] put their hand[s] up, and said, ����We'll fill that gap,'" said Heymann. "They're incredible at all levels. They've been extremely important partners in polio eradication and continue to be."

One of the mottos of the polio eradication effort is that no child is safe until every child is safe, due to the unflagging transmissibility of the poliovirus. With polio still occurring in the wild in six nations, and the reappearance of the disease in 12 African nations previously declared polio free, the campaign goes on. Still, many nations -- Ethiopia among them -- hope to allow the disease to slip into memory and look to other development challenges.

That is the vision of Ethiopian-American Esra Teshome, a Rotary Club member from Seattle, Washington. He has led a half dozen missions to his homeland as part of the polio eradication effort, but the East African nation has not experienced a case in several years, and Teshome is looking toward other goals that Rotarians can achieve.

"We see that providing clean drinking water to the villages is something we need to do and we're working on providing some wells and tapping some springs so that the villagers will have clean drinking water throughout the year," said Teshome from his Seattle insurance office in a Washington File interview.

The number of Rotary Club members who join him or other teams on the vaccination campaigns has grown steadily in the half dozen years that he has been involved. For Teshome, participation in NIDs has served as a balm to a wound from long ago. Like many Ethiopians who have settled in the United States, Teshome, 53, was in this country going to college when a military junta violently seized power in his native land in 1974. Teshome stayed here, and did not suffer the chaos and tumult that rocked Ethiopia for years.

"This has been my redemption," Teshome said of his involvement in the polio eradication initiative.

The GPEI hit a low point early in 2004 when the goal of 2005 eradication drew closer and the disease was re-appearing in African countries that had once been polio free. The cause gained renewed support throughout 2004, however, as African leaders recommitted themselves to the campaign and Group of Eight nations (G8) also emphasized the importance of the goal and pledged additional resources. The G8 comprises Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia.

David Groner has observed these difficulties in the campaign, but is not daunted. Steady progress in achieving vaccination coverage is the important thing, he said, not meeting an arbitrary deadline for total eradication. "If not 2005, then let's make it 2006. The people who work with me will not quit until we're finished."

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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