Kilkenny Loreto students sell crocus bulbs for international End Polio Now campaign

Students at Kilkenny City’s Loreto Secondary School are appealing for your support to help eradicate polio.
The students are taking part in the End Polio Now campaign, supported worldwide by Rotary International, to coincide with World Polio Day, which is marked this week.

For their part in the effort, the students will be selling crocus bulbs through shops and businesses in the city centre. The flowers, when they bloom, will be purple - the same colour used by medical teams to mark the finger of a child who has been immunised against polio.

The students have been busy, in recent weeks, making up pretty, purple packages of bulbs which are now on sale, costing €5 for ten or €10 for a parcel of 20.
Businesses in the city centre, including the Kilkenny People office, have stocks for sale.

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The last case of polio in Ireland was recorded in 1984, however it still affects children in several countries. It is a paralysing, and potentially deadly, infectious disease that most commonly affects children under the age of five. One in every 200 polio infections leads to permanent paralysis. The virus spreads from person to person, typically in contaminated water.

However, Polio is a vaccine preventable disease and it is thanks to this vaccine it has been eradicated in Ireland, and most parts of the world.

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The Interact Club at the Loreto is a school branch of Rotary Kilkenny. Rotary has been working to eradicate polio for more than 35 years.
As a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, they have reduced polio cases by 99.9% since the first project to vaccinate children in the Philippines in 1979.

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Rotary members have contributed more than $2.1 billion and countless volunteer hours to protect nearly three billion children in 122 countries from this disease. Rotary’s advocacy efforts have played a role in decisions by governments to contribute more than $10 billion to the effort.

Today, polio remains endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it’s crucial to continue working to keep other countries polio-free. If all eradication efforts stopped today, within 10 years, polio could paralyse as many as 200,000 children each year. Just $3 will fully vaccinate a child against polio.