Braving Storm Benjamin, a team of around a dozen intrepid Banbury Rotary Club members and friends today planted 12,000 crocus corms at Banbury Cemetery and Crematorium.
Why?
Because, come spring, they hope the burst of purple colour, will raise awareness of Rotary’s global mission to eradicate the terrible disease - polio.
Read on to find out about a project that dwarfs the scale of HS2 but is 99.8% complete!
For over 35 years, Rotary and its members have been committed to the global fight to eradicate polio. Like many UK Rotary Clubs, Banbury Rotary Club actively participates in Purple4Polio initiatives to raise awareness of this worldwide campaign.
The significance of the colour purple is that in many developing countries, when a child receives their life-saving polio drops during mass immunisation days, their little finger is marked with purple dye to show they’ve been vaccinated.
Back in 1985, there were 125 polio-endemic countries, with hundreds of new cases reported every single day. Thanks to Rotary and its partners, only 12 cases of wild poliovirus were reported in the past 12 months—six in Afghanistan and six in Pakistan.
As impressive as this progress is, polio remains a threat until it is fully eradicated. That’s why we must continue ensuring every child, everywhere, is vaccinated. This effort requires over 2 billion doses of oral polio vaccine to be administered to more than 400 million children across 50+ countries every year.
