Measles & Rubella Campaign in India: Rotary International
Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen
Thank you to each and every one of you for being here with us today. We are very pleased to have you all with after a long time now.
This year we are glad to include Measles and Rubella Campaign as part of Rotary Social Service. We are pleased to have all the participants especially Measles and Rubella Coordinators, who will play a very crucial role in these campaign and make it a success.
I would like to thank Government of India for entrusting Rotary International to play significant role and help to achieve the target to eliminate measles and control rubella in India by 2020, thereby ending the associated death in new borns children and aiding in the accomplishment of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Both measles and rubella are major public health concerns affecting in the socio-economic status of a family.
Measles is a major childhood killer disease and rubella is responsible for fetal death or permanent birth defects.
Measles kills almost 90,000 children under the age of 5 and infects around 7 million people globally. While more than 100,000 (one lakh) babies are born with CRS every year.
In India alone 2.5 million children (out of 26 million children born every year) are affected by Measles and Rubella where nine Million fail to receive all vaccination required by children of one year of age.
Government of India launched Measles & Rubella vaccination Campaign in February 5, 2017 with 5 states/UT namely Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Goa, Lakshadweep and Puducherry which was completed with 97% coverage i.e. 3.3 crore children were vaccinated.
So far 20 states have been covered under this campaign with the achievement of over 92 Million successful vaccination of children.
As a Rotarian, I feel that we all should come together once again to prove ourselves that we can make India a better place to live , especially for children who are born or yet to be born, free from deathly disease and lifelong suffering.
These children have every right to live a healthy life and I believe we could make that possible with our efforts and dedication to help government to eliminate and control these deathly diseases in the near future.
In this endeavor , to assist the Government of India in Measles Elimination Campaign, we look forward to give our 100% like what we did during the successful eradication of Polio from India.
As a concrete effort for the involvement of Rotary’s in the program, we have drawn various advocacy and creative plan that would help us to achieve the target.
Within the framework of these campaign plans, we look forward for the support of everyone present here today. It just takes less than $2 to vaccinate a child against measles and rubella which in return yield $58.
We all know that this is not an easy task as it seems to be and the challenge is as big as we can imagine, but all the same it is not impossible. We all have experienced the situation when we started the Polio Eradication Program. Though the task was difficult yet we achieved it .
FUNDS ARE NEEDED– We need you and your support in each and every way whether it is generous fund to support in our program or to be engaged in every special campaign, meeting, workshop. As an unknown author state, “When courage, genius, and generosity hold hands, all things are possible“.
AN URDU CUPLET
As I conclude here today, I look forward to the positive outcome of this event, I hope you all have a wonderful day ahead and close with the quote by Winston Churchill, “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give”.