Bigfork Rotary president helps fight polio in India's slums

As the buzz around eventual "Best Picture" winner "Slumdog Millionaire" reached a fever pitch in the weeks before the Oscars, one Bigfork Rotarian was experiencing the backwaters of the world's second most populous country first-hand.

Joanne Knutson, president of the Bigfork Rotary Club, spent two weeks in January and February helping inoculate children in rural India against polio, a debilitating disease that has been eradicated in all but a few far-flung spots on the globe.

Knutson traveled to Dehli, in northern India, in late January to participate in Rotary's National Immunization Day. From there, she traveled with a group of five other Rotarians to the town of Bijnor, about five hours further north.

"It was just filthy," Knutson said, recounting open sewers, abundant trash and the general unsanitary conditions of India's rural citizens. Between the lack of public sanitation facilities and many people making their "home" out of little more than a lean-to, Knutson noted that because cows are sacred in India's most common religion - Hinduism - some families let their bovines sleep alongside them indoors.

"You really have to smell and hear the country, not just see it, because it's so different from what we're used to," she said.

Knutson's group traveled around Bijnor to different neighborhoods on Feb. 1, National Immunization Day, and then went door to door in the week following to ensure that no children had been missed.

Polio was once one of the most feared diseases on the planet, but since Jonas Salk invented the first vaccine in 1952, the disease has disappeared from most of the world. Since the virus is transmitted most frequently through fecal contamination, it is no surprise that the only countries where the disease remains endemic are the developing nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and India, where millions live in abject poverty. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, polio epidemics broke out in large cities around the world during the summer months when sanitation was at its worst.

Because polio vaccines don't take if the recipient has any other disease - like dysentery - Knutson said children are often given the vaccination up to 10 times in hopes of raising the odds of it being effective.

"Bijnor hasn't had any cases of polio in a year-and-a-half," Knutson said. "There have been only six cases in India this year."

Since Rotary got involved in the effort to eradicate polio in 1998, the results of the campaign have been staggering. Knutson said that between 2000 and 2007, India had about 2,000 polio cases per year. Prior to that, the number was closer to 1,000 per day in the nation of more than 1 billion people.

The organization has been so successful in its fight against polio, that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged $355 million dollars to the cause if Rotary can raise $200 million.

For clubs in Montana, that means a contribution of $2,800 each year until the deadline in 2012.

But for Knutson, the cause couldn't be more worthwhile, especially considering Rotary's goal of ridding India of the disease in the next two years.

"Those people work so hard for so very little," she said. "It still boggles my mind that people live like that."