Fred Daniels, who will become our District Governor on July 1 but already has made himself a strong presence on the 7190 scene, manages a grin as he emerges chilly but relatively unscathed from the New Year’s Day “Polar Plunge” in Lake George, an annual fundraiser for Rotary’s ongoing fight against polio.

Fred’s friends pledged $1,050 for him to go in up to his neck in the lake during the event. Current DG John Mucha has announced that if all pledges and matching funds are realized, 7190 will have raised about $30,000 through this year’s plunge.

(Thanks to Christine Daniels for the photo.)

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• From the October 2016 issue of The Rotarian

Tom Frieden is a little out of breath. He just climbed the stairs from a meeting to his office on the top floor of the 12-story headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“I did that because we have a beautiful stairway in this building. I can look outside, and I get better email coverage on the stairs than I do in the elevator,” the CDC director says. His trip up the stairs sums up his view on one of the tenets of his work: “The sweet spot of public health is making the healthiest thing to do the default value — in other words, the easiest thing to do.”

Frieden took his post in 2009 after stopping the largest outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in U.S. history in New York City, helping establish TB treatment programs in India that have saved more than 3 million lives, and serving seven-plus years as health commissioner of New York City. There, he worked with Mayor Michael Bloomberg to make all restaurants and bars smoke-free, making New York the first major city to do so outside California. His controversial policies had him criticized as a “nanny” in some circles, and lauded as a visionary in others.

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‘The thing that worries us from a public health standpoint … is the potential of an influenza pandemic. … We’re still not as prepared as we’d like to be. We don’t have the vaccines we’d like, and the virus is … constantly mutating.’

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As head of the U.S. public health system, Frieden has taken on everything from ebola to the flu. But, where his work most closely intersects with Rotary’s is in polio eradication –- CDC joins Rotary, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Health Organization (WHO) as a core partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. CDC deploys scientists to investigate outbreaks of polio, identify the strain of poliovirus involved, and pinpoint its geographic origin.

“Rotary has done such a phenomenal job for so many decades on this, and now we are poised to get over the finish line and end polio once and for all,” Frieden said in an interview with Rotarian senior editor Diana Schoberg about ending polio and the best buys in public health.

THE ROTARIAN: Polio has been eradicated in the U.S. since 1979. Why does CDC stay involved?

FRIEDEN: CDC takes polio eradication very seriously. We focus on supporting the front lines wherever polio continues to spread. I am deeply engaged with all aspects of the response and support for our team. That includes laboratory work, community outreach, organization of the response, extension of the capacity of local doctors and outreach workers, and tracking cases so we can target our responses and get to the last bastions of polio in the world.

TR: The estimated funding gap to eradicate polio is $1.5 billion. Why is it such a large number?

FRIEDEN: It costs a lot because as long as there’s still polio anywhere, every country needs to continue to act as if polio could get reintroduced. Every year polio is not eradicated will cost another $800 million. You need vaccines, surveillance, and social mobilization. All of that takes people and money. Up to 400 million children still need to be immunized every year, and surveillance in up to 70 countries needs to not only continue, but be intensified, to ensure we are finding all possible cases of polio for as long as polio may be spreading.Read More »

A former First Daughter has joined Rotarians and others working around the globe to eradicate the scourge of polio, a disease her family knows well because her father-in-law was struck by it as a youth. We also have posted this video on our club’s Facebook page and urge you to go there and “share” it on your own page to help spread the word.

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• From Reuters News Service

Two companies making vaccines to help the world eradicate polio are failing to produce enough, so many countries should prepare to give lower doses to make stocks last, a group of experts has advised the World Health Organization (WHO).

With polio on the brink of eradication globally, the WHO wants to see a worldwide switch from the traditional “live” oral polio vaccine, which runs the risk of spreading the disease, to an inactivated vaccine that needs to be injected.

But, WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE), which meets twice a year, said a severe shortage of inactivated vaccine means many countries should use a fractional dose, via an intra-dermal rather than intra-muscular injection, allowing each dose to go twice as far.

“There are only two manufacturers of the vaccine, and they are having some problems with production of the vaccine, and getting enough raw material of the polio virus,” SAGE Chairman Jon Abramson told reporters on a conference call.

Polio is a contagious viral disease that invades the nervous system and can cause irreversible paralysis within hours, and sometimes respiratory failure and death.

“Each time we hear that there’s a further reduction in the amount that can be anticipated, we have to make further adjustments,” Abramson said. “My hope is this problem can be Read More »