Poliomyelitis, known as polio, is a viral disease that can cause
paralysis. It once infected millions of people each year, but
vaccination efforts around the world have brought the yearly number of
new cases to just less than 1000. That dramatic reduction is in large
part thanks to Rotary International, a service organization, and its
efforts to eradicate the disease completely by 2012. Rotary’s
End Polio Now campaign has attracted support from
famous polio survivors, as it did recently from Itzhak Perlman, one of
the greatest violinists in the world.
Photo courtesy of VOA | Slideshow by JoAnne Green
Itzhak Perlman is one of the greatest violinists of our time. He
graduated from the famous Julliard School of Music in New York and received
the National Medal of the Arts and 15 Grammy Awards.
But before the accolades and awards, the Israeli-born musician was a
four-year-old boy stricken by a debilitating disease.
"One afternoon I was on the bed, and I was standing up on my bed in Tel
Aviv, and I felt a little weak, and I had to sit down, ‘cause you know I was
four years old - I was wild riding bikes and stuff like that… And all of a
sudden, I felt like I couldn’t do it, and that was it," he recalls.
Before a vaccine was developed for polio, Perlman became one of its victims.
The disease may have robbed him of the ability to walk, but it did not
jeopardize the masterful movement of his
arms.
Polio also failed to rob him of his voice, a powerful asset to Rotary in its
fight to end the disease, once and for all.
Before performing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Rotary's Concert to
End Polio, he spoke to VOA about his music and about the dread disease.
"One of the stories of, I suppose, comical situations here is that we still
have polio considering that we have vaccines available," Perlman said.
"The challenge is that while there is polio
anywhere in the world, all children are at risk," Carol Pandak said.
Pandak leads Rotary International’s effort to eradicate polio in the four
countries where it is still present: India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
Nigeria. To keep the disease isolated, millions of doses of vaccine are
needed each year.
"To get to zero, you need to immunize 300 million, 400 million children
every year, Pandak said."
The global effort is expensive. "It costs around $800 million a year for
global polio eradication. Over the next two years we have a funding gap of
720 million," she explained.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have pledged $355 million. Rotary
hopes to raise another 200 million with an aggressive campaign.
General Manager John Osterlund says the campaign is working, thanks in part
to Itzhak Perlman.
"Certainly his presence adds a great deal to what we’re hoping to accomplish
in terms of bringing to attention of people here in the Midwest,
particularly in Chicago, that although polio has been gone from the United
States for many, many decades, it’s still a very real thing in the world,"
he said.
"We’ve been jabbing at this thing,” Perlman adds, “and the knockout punch is
very close."
Perlman has been using the thing he knows best - music - to combat the
one thing he was unable to fight as a child.
He was the featured performer at Rotary's Concert to End Polio. The
proceeds will go to the End Polio Now campaign.
"If people know that I am a polio survivor, that I’ve had my career despite
that, for me, that’s not really an important fact. The important fact is
why go through that if you have a vaccine," he said.
The vaccine is working. There were fewer than 1000 new cases of polio in
2010, down from 350,000 cases in 1988. But experts say it could make a
comeback, if vaccines don't reach into the most remote corners of the world.
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