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Dear Reader,
For many of us in Canada, polio belongs to another time.
Some of us remember the fear it once created. We remember children in leg braces, stories of iron lungs, swimming pools closed during outbreaks, and parents frightened that an ordinary summer illness might leave a child permanently paralyzed. Others know polio only from history books.
That distance from the disease is one of the great successes of modern public health.
It is also one of the reasons we cannot afford to forget about it.
Polio has not yet disappeared from the world. We have come astonishingly close - - closer than almost any generation before us could have imagined - but the virus still exists. And until transmission is stopped everywhere, every country remains potentially vulnerable.
Polio is a highly infectious viral disease that primarily affects children under five, although an unvaccinated person of any age can contract it. Most infections cause few or no symptoms, which is one reason the virus can circulate unnoticed. But approximately one in every 200 infections results in irreversible paralysis. Among those who become paralyzed, 5 to 10 percent can die when the muscles that control breathing are affected.
There is no cure for polio. It can only be prevented through vaccination.
Today, when we talk about eliminating polio, it is useful to understand that the global effort is fighting two forms of poliovirus transmission.
The first is wild poliovirus — the naturally occurring virus responsible for the epidemics that once swept through communities worldwide.
There were originally three strains of wild poliovirus. Wild poliovirus types 2 and 3 have now been eradicated. Only wild poliovirus type 1 remains, and sustained endemic transmission is now confined to just two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As of August 12, 2026, only 18 cases of wild poliovirus had been reported worldwide this year — 15 in Afghanistan and three in Pakistan. Yet environmental surveillance continues to detect the virus in wastewater in both countries, demonstrating that transmission has not yet been completely interrupted.
The second challenge is circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus, commonly called cVDPV.
The name can be confusing and deserves explanation.
The oral polio vaccine contains a weakened form of the virus. It has been one of the most important tools in bringing wild polio to the brink of eradication because it creates strong immunity in the intestine, where poliovirus replicates. In communities with high vaccination rates, this works extremely well.
Very rarely, however, when too few children in a community are immunized, the weakened vaccine virus can circulate from one unvaccinated child to another for a prolonged period. Over time, it can undergo genetic changes and regain the ability to cause paralysis.
The underlying problem is therefore not widespread vaccination. It is insufficient vaccination and gaps in population immunity. The same solution stops both wild and vaccine-derived polio: reaching enough children with effective vaccination to prevent the virus from circulating.
This explains why polio can occasionally reappear in countries where wild poliovirus has already been eliminated. Vaccine-derived outbreaks continue to occur, particularly in communities facing low immunization coverage, conflict, migration, weak health systems, poor sanitation or difficulty reaching children consistently.
And it brings us to perhaps the most remarkable part of this story.
In 1988, when the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) was launched, polio was endemic in more than 125 countries. An estimated 350,000 children were being paralyzed every year — roughly 1,000 children every day.
Since then, global polio cases have been reduced by more than 99.9 percent.
More than 125 endemic countries have become two.
Hundreds of thousands of cases each year have become a handful.
We are now standing at the threshold of accomplishing something humanity has achieved only once before: the worldwide eradication of a human disease. The first was smallpox. Polio could be the second.
But there is a paradox at the heart of eradication.
The closer we get to zero, the harder the job becomes.
Finding and vaccinating the first 99 percent of children was an enormous undertaking. Reaching the final populations requires something even more demanding. The remaining virus survives in some of the most difficult environments in the world — places affected by conflict, political instability, population movement, limited health infrastructure and communities that may distrust governments or vaccination programs.
Vaccination teams must sometimes travel into remote or dangerous regions. Mobile populations must be reached repeatedly. Public health workers must build trust community by community. Laboratories and environmental surveillance systems must continually look for a virus that may be circulating without producing a visible case of paralysis.
This is why 99.9 percent is not victory.
With many objectives, achieving 99.9 percent would represent extraordinary success. With an infectious disease capable of crossing borders, the final fraction is precisely where the threat remains.
If eradication efforts were stopped, Rotary reports that polio could again paralyze as many as 200,000 children every year within a decade.
And this is where Rotary’s role deserves to be understood.
Rotary began its first major polio project in the Philippines in 1979, vaccinating children against a disease that was still widespread around the world. In 1985, Rotary launched PolioPlus, making the eradication of polio one of the organization’s defining global commitments.
Then, in 1988, Rotary became a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative alongside the World Health Organization and other international partners.
Rotary has remained true to that commitment for more than four decades.
To date, Rotary has contributed more than US$2.9 billion through PolioPlus and countless volunteer hours. Rotary-supported efforts have helped protect more than 3 billion children in 122 countries, while Rotary’s advocacy has contributed to governments' decisions to provide more than US$11 billion toward eradication.
That contribution goes far beyond purchasing vaccines.
Ending polio requires getting vaccines to children, training and deploying health workers, maintaining laboratories and sophisticated disease-surveillance networks, transporting vaccines into difficult locations, responding rapidly when the virus is detected, communicating with communities and building the trust required for families to bring their children forward.
This is an enormous operating system built around one objective: find the virus, reach the children and stop transmission.
Rotary’s partnership with the Gates Foundation gives individual contributions additional leverage. Under the current partnership, donations raised by Rotary for polio eradication are matched at 2:1, within the partnership’s funding limits — potentially generating up to US$150 million annually for the eradication effort.
There is also encouraging evidence that the world continues to close the financial gap toward eradication. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s extended 2022–2029 strategy has a US$6.9 billion budget. Following major commitments made in 2025 by governments, foundations, Rotary International and other partners, the remaining funding gap has been reduced to approximately US$440 million.
That still represents a substantial challenge.
But consider what it represents.
We are not being asked to begin the fight against polio.
We are being asked to finish it.
Our Rotary club is actively raising funds for polio eradication. We are asking our members, our community and our sponsors to help us contribute to this final effort.
For our sponsors, I believe there is something particularly meaningful about this opportunity.
Your contribution becomes part of a global initiative whose results can already be measured across generations. It becomes part of the vaccinations delivered to children, the health workers who reach remote communities, the laboratories that detect the virus before another child is paralyzed, and the international infrastructure required to finally drive transmission to zero.
And through Rotary’s partnership with the Gates Foundation, the impact of funds raised for polio can be multiplied.
There are many worthy causes competing for attention and resources. Few allow us to say that the ultimate objective is not simply improvement, reduction or better management of a problem.
The objective here is zero.
Zero wild poliovirus transmission.
Zero vaccine-derived outbreaks.
Zero children paralyzed by polio.
And ultimately, zero need for future generations to fear this disease.
Rotary made a promise decades ago to help rid the world of polio. Generations of Rotarians, health workers, governments, scientists, community leaders, donors and volunteers have carried that promise forward.
They have brought us from 350,000 children paralyzed every year to the final 0.1 percent.
Now our responsibility is not to admire how far we have come.
It is to finish.
Because the lasting impact of eradicating polio will not be measured by what happens next year, or even ten years from now.
It will be measured by something much bigger: a world in which no child, anywhere, ever develops polio again.
That is a legacy worth helping to create.
Sources: World Health Organization; Global Polio Eradication Initiative; Rotary International. Current case information is based on GPEI reporting as of August 12, 2026.
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