Bill Gates Rotary Polio Speech January 21, 2009
Thank you, John. And thank you all for such a warm welcome. I am excited that the Gates Foundation has joined Rotarians in the fight against polio. That’s why I put on my Rotary hat. And I’m honored to address the men and women who help guide the work of more than 33,000 Rotary clubs around the world. I’d like to start by telling you about my wife Melinda’s Aunt Myra. We see her a few times a year. Aunt Myra worked for many years taking reservations for Delta Airlines. She lived in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina, and then she moved to Dallas, Melinda’s home town. She loves to see our kids. When we all get together, she’ll sit down on the floor and play games with them. Aunt Myra also has polio. She’s in braces, and she has been ever since she was a little girl. [PAUSE] Our children only know what polio is because of their aunt. Otherwise, the disease would just be another historical fact they learn about in school. In fact, even though I was born just three years after one of the worst polio epidemics in American history, I didn’t know anyone with polio when I was growing up. That’s how far we’ve come. The same story of success has been repeated over and over again for children not just in the United States but also in Bolivia and Vietnam and Croatia and Morocco. In the last 20 years, thanks to your hard work, polio has declined by 99 percent. In 1988, 350,000 people got polio. By 2008, the number was down to just a couple of thousand. That is an amazing statistic, and it is part of a trend of overwhelming progress in the whole field of global health. My favorite statistic about global health is this: In 1960, 20 million young children died. Two years ago, that figure was 10 million. In short, in my lifetime, the world has learned how to save more than 10 million children every year. Surely, that is humanity’s greatest accomplishment in the last 50 years. And innovations both simple and complex made it possible. From knit caps that keep newborns warm to the most advanced vaccines, innovations can save lives. But it doesn’t happen without the phenomenal work of groups such as Rotary, which make sure that innovations reach the people who need them.
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