AS BRADFORD on Avon Rotary Club enters its 30th year, I would like, through your letters page, to thank the communities of Bradford on Avon and Trowbridge for their generous support for the many charity projects with which we have been involved.
Some projects have been for local causes, some for distant lands such as Africa and India. However I would like to explain in greater detail about Polio Plus.
The club has sent thousands of pounds of your money to this Rotary International charity. In a nutshell, the aim is to eradicate poliomyelitis from planet Earth. To do this, all children in the world have to be vaccinated against the polio virus.
It started in 1979 with the vaccination of children in the Philippines, and to date, 2.5 billion children have been vaccinated in 122 countries.
Polio cases have been reduced by 99.9 per cent worldwide, and with only Pakistan and Afghanistan remaining endemic for poliomyelitis. As of February 17, 2016, 74 cases of paralytic poliomyelitis due to wild poliovirus had been reported globally with onset of paralysis in 2015, compared to 359 for 2014. All cases are wild poliovirus type 1. (In September 2015 global eradication of wild poliovirus type 2 was declared and type 3 has not been detected         globally since November 2012.)
Those of us of more mature years will remember in our youth, swimming pools being closed because of outbreaks of the disease, and most will have had classmates with callipers and sticks. Some will have known of people who died. We now can hope that soon no one will see the results of this deadly disease.
To mark the Polio Plus Campaign, Rotary Clubs throughout the UK planted thousands of purple croci corms in various public locations.
This is a link to the use of a purple dye on the index finger to denote those children who have been vaccinated against the disease and provides a monitor of the success of the campaign. Your readers in Bradford on Avon may have seen the croci as a splash of colour in Westbury Gardens. Thank you West Wiltshire.
David Crow
President of the Rotary Club of Bradford on Avon