Rotary club plants hope in fight to end curse of polio
A SWATHE of striking crocuses are set to appear at Burton Albion’s Pirelli Stadium next spring – and there is a very special reason for the splash of colour.
Members of Burton Rotary Club have planted 4,000 purple crocus bulbs at the home of Burton Albion in Princess Way as part of Rotary’s Purple4polio initiative.
This initiative is aimed at raising awareness of the continuing need to eradicate polio. Rotary members have been at the forefront of the End Polio Now campaign for more than 30 years.
In this time the club and its partners have protected almost three billion children by raising money to pay for them to be vaccinated against the devastating disease and their campaign has prevented 19 million children from being paralysed by polio, a spokesman has said.
Cases of wild poliovirus have fallen by 99.9 per cent, with only two cases present in the world so far in 2021, one each in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A Rotary spokesman said: “No child anywhere is safe until every child has been fully vaccinated. “To finish the job, over two billion doses of oral polio vaccine still have to be administered to more than 400 million children in over 50 countries, each and every year. We have to have zero cases of polio and zero positive environmental samples before the world can finally be certified polio free.
“Many of us can remember when this awful illness was endemic in this country, with both children and adults being kept alive by ‘iron lungs’ before widespread vaccination removed it from the UK.”
The bulbs have been planted in the ground around the League One side’s ground and will be a colourful spectacle for players, club officials and fans come the spring when they flower.