ePolitix.com speaks to Allan O Jagger, president of Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland, about the campaign for a polio-free world.

Question: Can you tell us a bit about why the eradication of Polio became the priority of Rotary International?

Allan O Jagger: The priority was given to us because we first tried an immunisation programme in the Philippines, which started in 1986 with a trial to immunise as many children as we could under 10 years old within a period of five years to see how effective a national immunisation campaign would be. It proved so effective that the World Health Organisation, Unicef, and the American Centre for Disease Control and Prevention realised that a global campaign could be used following that model and the immunisation of every child in the world against polio could be a possibility.

At that time, there were 350,000 new cases of polio in the world annually and a lot of those children died; it was costing the world a lot of money to treat polio victims. The WHO recognised this cost and it became a dream of everybody to immunise every child against polio. Rotary was the only organisation recognised by the other three as a partner who could deliver the dream. Rotary is in 200 countries and has 33,000 Rotary clubs with 1.2 million members who could help to deliver the vaccine.

Question: Polio is now only endemic in four countries; this means huge progress has been made in the attempt to eradicate the disease, but where are these four remaining countries and what are the major obstacles to eliminating the disease there?

Allan O Jagger: The countries that are still Polio endemic are Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and Nigeria. There are different problems in each country. The main problem we have had is that when we first started to immunise against polio, there was something like 350,000 wild outbreaks of polio a year. Since then, we have managed to eliminate that by 99 per cent. What we are now facing is the bottom of the graph and it is going to take a lot longer to immunise these last children because of different problems in each country.

In some of the countries the children are so malnourished that the polio vaccine is not staying in their body; we had to immunise them 10 times and the vaccine was still not staying in. So doctors and other experts realised that we needed to tailor a vaccine to each area, this is proving immensely successful but is more costly. Each area is now getting its own vaccine and hopefully the cases are going to be reduced. The actual surveillance of each area is becoming more important than it ever was.

Question: The $100m grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the biggest one ever received by Rotary, you must be very grateful!

Allan O Jagger: The $100m grant is absolutely unbelievably good news for Rotary and it comes with a challenge for Rotary to raise the matching funds to boost it to $200m. Rotary has already raised and given $640m to the cause. We are looking now to our corporate partners, and the other organisations that work with Rotary to raise the money so we can access the $100m grant given by Bill and Melinda Gates, who have already given something like $52m to this global campaign because they believe in world health.

This is the largest public health campaign the world has ever seen and Rotary is at the heart of it, because of this Rotary are hoping to get new members who will want to join because of the gift of a polio free world that we are delivering. It is immensely important for Rotary; every member agreed to make a promise to eradicate polio. It is our number one goal and is what keeps us going.    

Question: Funding is obviously crucial, but you have also talked to ePolitix.com before about the willingness of Rotary volunteers to help out. How important are volunteers in the eradication of Polio?

Allan O Jagger: The funding is immensely important because we have to provide the vaccine and man 150 stations all over the world, which monitor how successful our campaign is.

What the volunteers do is deliver the vaccine, and in endemic countries, such as India, they pick an area that needs another dose of vaccine and it will then take about three months to organise one day or one week when all the vaccine is administered.

We then ask for volunteers all over the world to go and help Rotarians in India on the ground who organise locations to deliver the vaccine and make the stations clinically clean. Then volunteers come from all over the world to come and deliver the vaccine and in one week; we call it a National Immunisation Day. Last year we immunised 172 million children. And the volunteers are there for advocacy, as well as selling the dream of a polio-free world.

Question: Do you plan to run a National Immunisation Day in 2008?

Allan O Jagger: Yes. In Great Britain and Ireland we are encouraging all the Rotarians to help fund, with $150m, a national immunisation area in India. We will go next spring and help to administer the vaccine. For the volunteers, it is our passion. We will be able to see it, help deliver it, and we will be able to own it.

Question: Is there an educational element required in the eradication of the disease, what is the message Rotary volunteers take to the countries where polio is still a problem?

Allan O Jagger: We train everybody to administer the vaccine and we have medical people to help us. For the disease to be eradicated there has to be three years when there are no cases of wild polio in a country. So we have to educate people how to contain the disease, not to travel from a polio-endemic area to a polio-free area, surveillance is important. We also teach people how to recognise the disease and how to keep up the vaccine programme after the National Immunisation Days.

Once we go into these areas on the immunisation days, there are many other benefits for the communities. We set up other partnerships with them on water, health, hunger, illiteracy. We have wonderful projects from the UK going into these areas to help the developing countries with sanitation and illiteracy, and all those things we take for granted. That is what Rotary is about, an organisation of caring people from the developed world helping people in the developing world.

Question: Last year, Rotary International offered then prime minister Tony Blair the Polio Eradication Champion award. Do you have a good relationship with government?

Allan O Jagger: We have a fantastic relationship with the government and we just hope they can trust us to deliver their ambitions to have a polio-free world. It is really important that all our partners in the campaign to immunise all the children in the world play their part, and the British government have been absolutely unbelievable in their generosity to support the polio campaign. They have donated £310m to this campaign since 1998.

Coming up to 2008, we are looking to the government to help us by contributing to the global polio campaign. Our government is the second biggest donor to the campaign next to America. We are quite proud of that and would like to thank the government but we won't be able to eradicate polio unless the government keeps those pledges. Rotary has had a very important advocacy role.

Question: And so is the eradication of polio something that can really be achieved?

Allan O Jagger: Yes. It can only be achieved however if government keep making their pledges and wonderful people like Bill and Melinda Gates keep helping us. But it can only happen if Rotarians maintain the good work of delivering the vaccines.

There is only one other disease that has been eradicated and if we can deliver this it will be a wonderful gift to mankind. We think our dream will come true, the figures are there, we have already reduced polio by 99 per cent, but that one per cent is going to be the most difficult. In war zones like Afghanistan, it will be particularly difficult to find that last child.

What we also run, incidentally, is a partnership with universities in the world teaching peace and conflict resolution studies and we have something like 70 students every year trained in peace and conflict resolution.

We are the only organisation in the world running this programme. These people are also making significant contributions to the polio campaign. We had one former graduate from Bradford University, which is a peace centre in this country, who went to Sri Lanka and helped negotiate peace for seven days with the Tamil Tigers and the government so every child in that area could be immunised.

Rotary has some wonderful educational and humanitarian programmes that run parallel with one another for the good of the world.

Question: Do you know what Rotary will concentrate on after the eradication of polio?

Allan O Jagger: No. We want to get this one bottled up and then we can consider what we can achieve next. We can only achieve things with members and we are hoping with this campaign people will recognise Rotary as the number one service organisation.