The Rotary Model paves the way for a healthy system.

The Red Cross can combine ITN distribution with the highly successful Measles Initiative.

Rotary Model

The Rotary Model is now proven to be able to deliver multiple public health goods, like vaccines and Insecticide Treated mosquito Nets (also known as ITNs or bednets) quickly, cheaply and efficiently. The Rotary Model consists of three parts:

• Mass Social Mobilization to get people out to vaccination stations,

• Logistics to handle vaccines and vaccination of masses of people and

• Establishment of Surveillance Clinics to track diseases and eradication efforts.

The Rotary Model delivers essential goods and builds the capacity of the health care system to deal with the local problems and address opportunities. The vaccines and medicines save lives and improve health immediately. The Surveillance Clinics provide bricks and mortar laboratories and trained personnel who can readily apply their skills to new challenges. The Rotary Model creates progress in the most fundamental way, by showing and training the local professionals and volunteers how to deal with their own issues.

The Rotary Model seeks to assure that along with vaccines come the system building activities that set the stage for building infrastructure - both physical and intellectual. The Virtuous Cycle is ready to be put into place.

Behind the Rotary Model is the desire to leave a legacy of a healthy independent and local health care system with trained people and adequate laboratories serving a healthy population.

PolioPlus: Anytime vaccinators go out, they deliver several vaccines and often medicines. The idea of 'Several inputs in one carry" lowers costs for all parties and changes the outlook.

In 2001 the Red Cross/Crescent Societies adapted the Rotary Model to their Measles Initiative. The Measles Initiative is virtually a copy of the Polio Campaign with a different little bottle. The Measles Campaign has dropped death rate from Measles by over 90% every place it has been. Bottom line: the Measles Initiative regularly reaches over 90% of the children in a given country.

History of the Rotary Model

Rotarians undertook their PolioPlus Campaign in 1985. The goal was to raise enough money to provide vaccine for free to any country in the world that asked for it. It was early 1986 when Rotarians contacted the World Health Organization with the exciting news that they had indeed raised enough money, that they had just passed the goal.

The scientists at the WHO called a meeting to decide, privately, what the absolute best result was that they could hope for. The answer: reduce Polio to a mere 1000 new infections per day. Absolute best hopes for the disease. In 2003, the world number of infections for the whole year was under 300.

In 1988 the successes of the early campaigns led the WHO to declare that Polio could in fact be eradicated! Many scoffed. Now the campaigns are focused on a couple provinces of Nigeria and India, and to where the virus escapes to from there.