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As Published by Rotary Down Under, attached is an Open Letter to the Australian Prime Minister urging Australia to re-engage in the fight to eradicate polio.
In his address to delegates at the 2011 Rotary International Convention, Bill Gates, Jr, urged all Rotarians to apply pressure to their politicians to step up their support of the global polio eradication campaign, while pointing out that Australia was among countries whose governments had previously been involved but had fallen away and who now needed to re-engage.
The polio campaign began when an Australian, Clem Renouf, was President of Rotary International in 1978-79. Rotarians in Australia and around the world have been working tirelessly in all the polio-endemic countries − there are only four left − and have since donated in excess of $1.3 billion. Our latest fundraising effort to raise $US200 million is nearing completion, in line with the effort to finally rid the world of this insidious disease.
We urge Rotarians to print the letter and post it to:
Julia Gillard MP
Prime Minister
Parliament House
Canberra
ACT 2600
Download the letter as a pdf here (Adobe PDF format)
Download the letter for Word here (Microsoft Word format)
or copy and paste it into the space provided at: www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm
Bill Gates Address to the 2011 RI Convention on Polio Plus
Source: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/2011-rotary-annual-convention.aspx
You May go to the above address linked here to watch a video recording of Mr Gates Speech or read the Prepared Remarks by Bill Gates, Co-chair and Trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Some Extracts follow below;
I’m proud to be a partner in the work that Rotary has been doing to eradicate polio. I’m well aware that the reason we’re even able to have a discussion about how to eradicate polio, is because Rotary’s efforts have helped get us 99 percent of the way there.
I describe myself as an impatient optimist. I have one simple statistic I like to use to explain my optimism. In 1960, of all the children in the world under the age of five, 20 million died of different diseases. Last year, that figure was down to 8.1 million. And so during that time, less than my lifetime, we’ve learned how to use life-saving tools, including vaccines, to save the lives of over 12 million children every year. As a whole, this has to be one of the great accomplishments of humanity over the past century. Now to build on this progress, and to get that number to be even lower, we need to get new vaccines for more diseases. We need to reach all the children. And we need to eradicate polio.
The question for all of us is, do we have what it takes?. Are donor countries willing to close next year’s $400 million funding gap, and see the job through to the very end? Are the countries where polio is still a threat willing to take extraordinary action to reach almost every single child with the vaccine? And are all of us ready to apply pressure to the leaders of these countries, when their answers to these questions are unsatisfactory? I challenge us all to do so.
Because if we fail, the disease will not stay at its current low level. It will spread back into the countries where it’s been eliminated, and it will kill and paralyze hundreds of thousands of children who used to be safe. Instead of energizing the field of global health with an amazing victory, we could lose decades of progress. We simply cannot allow that to happen. Failure in this fight is unacceptable. |