March 2025 PolioStop
The Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Rotary International Foundation, Mark Daniel Maloney, has encouraged the Federal Government to focus on the eradication of type 2 polio variant predominant in five states across the Federation, like it did with the Wild Polio Virus, which led to Nigeria being declared Wild Polio Virus free in 2020. […]
POLIOSTOP FOR DECEMBER 2023
We must fight misinformation to achieve our goals in 2024. It has been said that the idle mind is the devil’s workshop. What then is an idle mind with a mobile communications device and cheap internet data? The answer to this question can be found in the repeated setbacks being suffered by our programme due to misinformation being passed around social […]
JUNE 2023 POLIOSTOP EDITION
In Memoriam: Jonathan Babatunde Majiyagbe The question of what constitutes a good death is one that has been asked for a thousand years and one which continues to be asked today. In trying to answer that question, the Bard of Avon himself once wrote ‘When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves […]
POLIOSTOP FOR MARCH 2023
A LEGACY WORTH LEAVING It’s always sad when people die but often we find that the pain of loss is made easier to bear when they have left a good legacy behind. In the course of the effort to eradicate polio from the world, we have had to say goodbye to many of our friends […]
PolioStop For June 2022
On April 19 2022, Kunle Adeyanju, a Rotarian and incoming club President of the Rotary Club of Ikoyi Metro left London to begin a journey which would take him into France, Spain, Gibraltar and into Africa, he probably had an idea of the enormity of the task that lay before […]
PolioStop For March 2022
We received the news of Dr Pascal’s retirement from WHO with mixed feelings. We are happy for him for the grace of being able to take early retirement having gone 9 years of his 22 years with WHO working assiduosly to ensure polio is eradicated in Nigeria. But we will misss his immense knowledge, […]
PolioStop For September 2021
In recent weeks there has been a lot of reportage in the press of polio outbreaks in the country, some of them with frightening headlines that suggest that the wild poliovirus is back. While the vaccine-derived virus is still a menace that paralyses children, it must be distinguished from the wild […]
ENDEMICS ENDGAME: THE AFRICAN REGION SHOWS US WHAT IT WILL TAKE TO END POLIO FOR GOOD By Dr. Tunji Funsho
When Rotary embarked on the journey in pursuit of a polio-free world more than 35 years ago, 350,000 children around the world were being paralyzed by polio every single year. Together with our Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) partners, governments of the world, donors, and millions of health workers, we have moved mountains to eliminate polio in the country after […]
A history of vaccination 2,000 years of innovation gives the world a shot in the arm Story Written By: Erin Biba
Vaccines have prevented about 10 million deaths from disease since 1963, researchers estimate. Rotary members know the power of vaccination well: The oral polio vaccine has helped bring cases of wild polio down 99.9 percent since 1988, with the virus remaining endemic in only two countries today. And now, as COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed […]
Dr. Tunji Funsho, chair of Nigeria National PolioPlus Committee, is recognized as New African Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Africans of 2020.
Nigerian physician Dr. Funsho was the driving force behind a programme to eradicate polio from its last African redoubt in Nigeria. After a long career as a Lagos-based cardiologist, Funsho was meant to be enjoying his retirement but with polio still rampant and causing paralysis in children across Nigeria, he spearheaded Rotary International’s effort to […]