Local Rotarians Pedaling 500km to Eradicate Polio

Perceptions by Gerry Warner

By the time you read this, I should be on my old mountain bike somewhere between here and Spokane and feeling my age a bit. But I’ll have company, namely half a dozen members of the Cranbrook Sunrise Rotary Club, who are “Pedaling for Polio” in an attempt to raise $8,000 to vaccinate 25,000 children against the dread disease.

You read that right. Polio is still a dread disease in some isolated parts of the world even though it was eradicated almost 30 years ago in North America and Europe by the Salk vaccine. At its peak in the late 1950’s, polio killed more than 500,000 people-a-year world-wide and no one, including Bill Gates, wants to see polio make a comeback.

That’s why Gates offered several years ago to match any funds Rotary could raise to eradicate polio once and for all from the face of the earth. Since then, Rotary International and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have combined to raise more than $550 million in one of the largest humanitarian fund-raising campaigns in history. And that’s why the six of us are pedaling 550 km over the next six days to attend the Rotary International District 5080 Conference in Kennewick, Washington in the Tri-Cities area. Our motorized support team will also be pulling  a restored iron lung to Kennewick as part of the fund-raising effort and as a grim reminder of the bad old days when polio was ravaging this part of the world.

The iron lung was found a few years ago in a farmer’s field outside of Cranbrook  and painstakingly restored by Sunrise Rotary members to be used as a fund-raising prop during parades and Rotary functions. People can climb inside the creepy device and get a first-hand feel of the horrific times when polio victims were consigned to a life-time sentence in the metal cell in order to breathe and stay alive during their convalescence. I’m old enough to remember the last of those sad days and the fear people used to have of being forced into an iron lung which happened to one of my high school mates.

Those were frightening days.

But they began to come to an end in 1955 when Dr. Jonas Salk, an American medical researcher and virologist discovered an injectable vaccine that could safely immunize people against poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis as it was then known. In those dark days, mothers were fearful every spring of their children getting polio, which was a virulent flu-like disease spread in an oral/fecal manner by people contacting the virus in unsanitary conditions. This could happen almost anywhere and made polio at the time the next most feared thing to the atomic bomb in the nervous 1950’s.

Salk’s vaccine later came out in an oral form and millions began to be vaccinated around the world and Salk became one of the most famous people on earth. Despite his fame and the wealth it could have brought him, the good doctor refused to have his vaccine patented. Asked during a TV interview who owned the patent, he replied: “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" At the time of his death in 1995, Salk was working on a HIV vaccine and had received numerous awards.

No doubt on this long bike trip, there will be time when our muscles will ache, our resolve may falter – and if the current five-day weather forecast holds up – we may be damp and miserable. But thinking of a great doctor, scientist and humanitarian like Jonas Salk will hopefully spur us on to complete the fund-raising  journey he made possible for us.

And wearing our blinding, phosphorescent, Rotary jerseys, people on the road will certainly know who’s carrying out the “End Polio Now” campaign. If you’d like to make a donation yourself to the cause, cheques made out to the Cranbrook Sunrise Rotary Club can be dropped off care of yours truly at Cranbrook City Hall. Any donation $20 or over will receive a charitable tax receipt.