Jim Berg opines:  "Finally, Rotary gets the recognition it justly deserves! Our main focus of our beloved Rotary is the project conceived and driven by our 34,000 clubs and districts. This is a wonderful tool to support our ongoing drive to raise the funding to complete this important job : eradication of polio."  Learn more about the tremendous progress in killing polio. 

"Finally, Rotary gets the recognition it justly deserves! Our main focus of our beloved Rotary is the project conceived and driven by our 34,000 clubs and districts. This is a wonderful tool to support our ongoing drive to raise the funding to complete this important job : eradication of polio" as reported by Jim Berg. Apparently the Asian and other editions of editions of the current Time magazine has a big spread on the polio eradication. 

Read about the progress in fighting polio and Rotary’s role in eradicating this crippling disease. “Thanks to aggressive global vaccination programs led by Rotary International, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and, most recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the year just beginning could be the disease’s last.” 
(from an email by Jim Berg, RRFC 2012-2015)

Here is part of the Time article:

There’s no one place a virus goes to die — but that doesn’t make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out. In the developed world, vaccines have made once-common scourges such as measles, rubella, mumps and whooping cough rare to the point of near-extinction. Only once, however, has any virus been flushed from its last redoubts in both the body and the wild and effectively vaccinated out of existence. That virus was smallpox, which ceased to exist outside high-security labs in 1977. Since that day, humanity has been free to put the vaccines against the disease — and the terror its periodic outbreaks would cause — on the shelf forever.

Now we are tantalizingly close to another such epic moment. This time the disease in the medical cross hairs is polio, and there’s no minimizing the progress made against it. Just 25 years ago, polio was endemic to 125 countries and would paralyze or kill up to 350,000 people — the overwhelming majority of them children —  each year. Now the disease has been run to ground in just three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria, and in 2012, it struck only 215 people worldwide. Thanks to aggressive global vaccination programs led by Rotary International, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and, most recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the year just beginning could be the disease’s last.

(TIME: Read the magazine story on polio, available to subscribers here)

But polio still has strong-armed friends. On January 1, as the rest of the world celebrated the New Year, gunmen in Pakistan shot and killed seven medical aid workers — six of them women or girls — who had been part of the anti-polio drive. Those killings followed nine others in December, as well as the shooting of a Ghanaian doctor, also conducting polio-vaccination work in Pakistan, in July. The month before that, the Pakistani Taliban blocked the planned vaccination of 161,000 children until U.S. drone strikes in the country were halted.

Polio is a notoriously slippery disease, one that relies on — indeed its very survival depends on — just the kind of holes such sabotage efforts open in the vaccine safety net. In 2003, polio was similarly near its end when clerics in Northern Nigeria halted inoculations — claiming that the vaccine contained HIV and was designed to sterilize children. Within two years, cases of polio linked to the Nigerian strain were raging across 16 countries. And since once case of paralysis can result for every 200 cases of polio infection, that means there may be 199 other carriers silently and unknowingly spreading the virus.

(MORE: At the U.N., a Vow to Eradicate Polio by 2015)

Using children as viral suicide bombers this way is a new — and grotesque — form of bioterrorism, and the world, for now at least, is not standing idly by. After the December killings, Pakistani officials pledged to continue with the country’s plans to deploy 250,ooo health care workers to vaccinate 35 million children this year. The governments of Nigeria and Afghanistan have similarly vowed to see the eradication drive through to its end, as have the U.N. and the other institutions involved in the battle. The Islamic Development Bank has put fresh money behind the  push, donating $227 million to the vaccine program in Pakistan in particular. This is on top of the billions already provided by Rotary and the Gates Foundation alone.

All of that money could turn out to be very very well spent. One billion dollars per year over the next few years could save $50 billion  over the next 20 years in the costs of continuing to chase the disease around the globe and treat the children who are felled by it. And there is no way, of course, of putting a price tag on the suffering of those stricken children — or the importance of sparing other victims the same fate. The war with the polio virus and its human defenders has been joined — and 2013 could be the year in which the climactic battles are fought.

MORE: How a Ban on Polio Vaccination in Parts of Pakistan Puts the Entire World at Risk

MORE: The War Over Polio

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/01/03/the-final-battle-against-polio/#ixzz2HQf4RLAd

The 4-Way Test

From the earliest days of the organization, Rotarians were concerned with promoting high ethical standards in their professional lives. One of the world's most widely printed and quoted statements of business ethics is The 4-Way Test, which was created in 1932 by Rotarian Herbert J. Taylor (who later served as RI president) when he was asked to take charge of a company that was facing bankruptcy. This 24-word test for employees to follow in their business and professional lives became the guide for sales, production, advertising, and all relations with dealers and customers, and the survival of the company is credited to this simple philosophy. Adopted by Rotary in 1943, The 4-Way Test has been translated into more than a hundred languages and published in thousands of ways. It asks the following four questions:

"Of the things we think, say or do:

1. Is it the TRUTH?

2. Is it FAIR to all concerned?

3. Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?

4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?"

Daybreak Rotarians unanimously cheered the initiative for adoption awareness and foster parent recruitment.

Co-chairs Eddie Arredondo and Barbara Warden explained the program to the membership today. In a comprehensive push to increase the number of foster homes and adoptions in the Highland Lakes Daybreak Rotary has undertaken a life-changing service to abused and neglected children. Daybreakers will be involved in three major areas of activity which include (1) an "Adoption Day" event each November, (2) helping the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (TDFPS) to recruit prospective foster parents, and (3) assisting TDFPS in conducting the training necessary for certification as a foster parent. 

Members Arredondo (Burnet County Attorney), Leslie Vance (Burnet County's civil attorney) and Gil Jones (retired District Judge) all echoed the tremendous benefit that will come to abused and neglected children by increasing the number of foster homes in the area. Many new foster homes will become certified as "foster/adopt" homes meaning they are pre-approved for adopting a child needing a home.

Falls recognized the partnership with a beautiful plaque at graduation.

On Friday, June 6, Jim and Barbara Warden together with Jennifer and myself attended the graduation ceremonies for Marble Falls Career High School where we presented three scholarships of $1,000 each. Other organizations also awarded scholarships to some of the 36 graduates.

What we did not expect was to receive recognition by way of a beautiful plaque given to Daybreak. The plaque was presented to the Club on June 10.

The first annual (and first ever anywhere) picnic event for foster families has begun.

Daybreak's innovative (repeat) President Eddie Arredondo has added to Daybreak's increasing role to recruit and assist foster children in the Highland Lakes area.  Building on the successful Adoption Day last November, Daybreak is now hosting a Foster Family Fun Fest which will provide a day's entertainment for area foster families out at the Hidden Falls Adventure Park, courtesy of Daybreak Rotarians Brooks and Marian Blake (both former presidents of Daybreak). As is typical for Daybreak, this will be an all-hands-on-deck event as we host up to 200+ people on a Saturday.