By Jay Jamison
In 1921, a young man, full of vigor and potential, was suddenly afflicted with a debilitating disease. He’d lost any feeling and power from his waist down.
The diagnosis was of a well-known disease with a terrifying prognosis: he had polio. Later in that man’s life he was faced with another terrifying dilemma. On December 8, 1941, he had to stand in the Senate chamber and rouse Congress and a nation out of its peaceful slumber, and into World War II. By now you probably know that the man in question was Franklin Roosevelt.
Every Tuesday at 7 a.m. the Jacksonville Sunrise Rotary Club convenes in the conference room of the Holiday Inn Express in South Jacksonville. A jar is passed around for contributions to a fund dedicated to getting the highly successful polio vaccine to the last provinces in the world where the dreaded disease remains at large. Similar collections are made in Rotary clubs around the world. Dollars, pounds, rupees, shekels, drachmas, euros and other currencies are added weekly to the fund to eradicate polio.
What does this have to do with our little corner of the Illinois prairie? First, just look around. How many local cases of polio do you remember? If your answer is none, then that tells us a lot about how old you are. I’m old enough to remember people who were crippled with polio. That most readers do not have a recollection of this terrible disease is a testament to the effectiveness of the polio vaccine.
That enough people of my generation and previous generations have been vaccinated, meant that succeeding generations would not need to fear the warm months when the spread of the crippling effects of polio would strike both rich and poor. Simply put, the polio vaccine works.
Second, there are two Rotary clubs in Jacksonville, there’s also one in Pike County, and Springfield has five Rotary clubs, which makes this a local story as well as an international one. Add to these local clubs about 46,000 more clubs around the world, with 1.4 million members, and the scale of this effort is clear. The success of these local and international efforts has been borne out by the facts.
Through Rotary International, the World Health Organization and other contributors, the entire western hemisphere, Africa, Europe, India and most of Asia are now polio free. Only certain provinces of Pakistan and Afghanistan have recurring polio cases. The latest figures indicate that as of the end of 2021, Afghanistan had four cases and Pakistan had one reported case. Since 1988 worldwide polio cases have plunged 99.9%.
Like President Kennedy’s 1962 “We choose to go to the moon” speech, Franklin Roosevelt’s January 1944 radio broadcast about the fight against polio, stood as a tall challenge, especially during a world war. “The dread disease that we battle at home, like the enemy we oppose abroad, shows no concern, no pity for the young. It strikes — with its most frequent and devastating force — against children. And that is why much of the future strength of America depends upon the success that we achieve in combating this disease.”
Today, 78 years after Roosevelt’s call to action on the radio, we are on the brink of achieving the permanent eradication of this scourge. About the moon, Kennedy spoke with hope; about polio, Roosevelt spoke from experience.
