Narrabri Rotary is proud of its role as part of the Rotary International project to eliminate polio around the world. In August, Rotarians globally celebrated a milestone when Africa was declared free of wild poliovirus. About 30 years ago almost 350,000 people around the world suffered from polio. Now it survives only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the program to stamp out polio in those two countries is going the wrong way. In Pakistan the number of cases has risen from 12 in 2018 to 147 last year. In Afghanistan the Taliban prohibited door to door teams in the areas they control and has killed a health worker and two police guards, saying that vaccinations are a western conspiracy to weaken Islam, a claim which has spread widely on social media.
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