Digging deep to stop polio
It will be the colour purple in Muthill
“We bought them from our charity, which is End Polio Now, and donated them to Muthill in Bloom.
“They said thanks very much but we need somebody to plant them – so here we are.
“Each year we buy a box – a box has 4000 corns – and we have already planted them in Comrie and Crieff.
“We were asked to get two boxes so we have 8000 going in for Muthill.”
Susan Crawford, chair of Muthill in Bloom thanked Rotary for their donation and help with planting the bulbs.
Since 1985, Rotar y ’ s key humanitarian priority has been to rid the world of the contagious viral illness.
Rotary spearheaded the End Polio Now campaign at a time when there were over 1000 polio cases a day in 125 countries, paralysing and sometimes killing children.
Today, the number of cases is down by 99.9 per cent.
Over the last 30 years, Rotary clubs worldwide have helped raise $2 billion towards the eradication effort and protected over 2.5 billion children from the disease through vaccination programmes.
Rotarian Jim McConnell added: “At the moment Nigeria hasn’t had a case of polio in two years and if it gets to next summer that’s Africa cleared of polio, which is a heck of an achievement.
“I think Iraq and Pakistan are the only two countries left which get cases each year. It’s very difficult to get immunisation programmes in there.
“Rotary have raised over a billion pounds worldwide to eradicate the disease with Bill Gates doubling everything that is raised.”