Several community leaders in Taylor will be getting their faces smeared with whipped cream Thursday evening to fight a deadly disease on stage at Heritage Square Park. During the intermission of the Music on Main Concert tomorrow night, at around 6:45 p.m., at Heritage Square, George Qualley, senior pastor at Saint Paul Lutheran Church, Deborah Parker of Citizens National Bank, Connie Zycha of Austin Telco Federal Credit Union, Tia Rae Stone, president and chief executive officer of Greater Taylor Chamber of Commerce, and District 4 Council Member Robert Garcia will be taking a pie to the face to raise money to fight polio.
Stone, who is also president of the Rotary Club of Taylor, organized this effort as part of the Rotary District 5870 Central Texas’s fundraising drive for World Polio Awareness Day Oct. 24.
“Our goal is to raise $1500 to contribute to the fight this year,” Stone said. “We are almost there.”
Stone said she felt compelled to help with this world-wide drive to raise $50 million this year towards a mass vaccination program to eliminate the disease after learning about how big of a threat it still is and that it had returned to the shores of the United States.
“Polio has always seemed like something in the past or far away,” Stone said. “But when a case was found in New York earlier this year, I started talking about it more and realized that I have dear friends in my life who had Polio and, thankfully, recovered or who knew and were still afraid of a disease that crippled and killed their friends and family.”
In short, Stone said this effort is about raising awareness and making sure people understand that the devastating disease is still with us. “As we stand on the brink of polio eradication, we must not relent,” District 5870 Governor Shannon Coleman of Pflugerville said. “To do so risks the lives of children in our own cities and throughout the world. Let the eradication of this devastating and crippling disease be our gift to the world and to our own future generations.”
In 1985, Rotary launched its PolioPlus program, the first initiative to tackle global polio eradication through the mass vaccination of children. Rotary has contributed more than $2 billion and countless volunteer hours to immunize more than 3 billion children in 122 countries.
Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a paralyzing and potentially deadly infectious disease that most commonly affects children under the age of 5. The virus spreads from person to person, typically through contaminated water.
As a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the number of polio cases has been reduced by 99.9 percent since its first project to vaccinate children in the Philippines in 1979. But, if eradication efforts stopped today, experts predict that within 10 years, polio could paralyze as many as 200,000 children each year.
District 5870 includes 57 clubs and over 2,180 members serving their communities here in Central Texas from Corsicana to Yoakum and from Marble Falls to Somerville.
