British Rotarians help India in its final push to eradicate polio

New Delhi : In a school courtyard in Lucknow on a dusty Sunday afternoon, the final push in a heroic campaign to drive a crippling disease from the planet is under way.

Among scores of wide-eyed children, four-year-old Mohammad Yousuf is brought to the big wooden table under the yellow banners by his mother Afsar Jahan.

Uncomprehending but compliant, he tilts his head back and opens his mouth to receive two drops of polio vaccine. His less fortunate sister Saba Banu, 12, comes across the open space to join them, strikingly beautiful in her bright blue sari, swinging her deformed limb this way and that on her crutches. Saba's right leg is stunted from polio, which she contracted when she was two.

This campaign in the most densely populated state of India, Uttar Pradesh, is intended to stop polio blighting other lives as it has Saba's. Nobody knows how long it will last, how much more effort will be required or whether, in the end, we will get there at all.

In this country of desperate poverty and large families, disabled infants can be left in the rubbish or face a lifetime of begging on the street, but Afsar Jahan will not allow that to happen to Saba.

"She has always gone to school," she says of her daughter. "I will give her the best education I can so she will be compensated." Like every other parent, she would like Saba to marry but she knows her daughter's prospects are damaged.

Afsar Jahan helps spread the word about immunisation in her community. "I have suffered," she says. "Now I tell everyone, ‘Please, do not make the same mistake'."

The Lucknow schoolyard is on the frontline in the war against a virus that regularly used to maim children in Britain. Calliper and crutches were a common sight in the 1950s, when the UK had 45,000 cases. The arrival of the polio vaccine in the 1960s wiped out the disease in developed countries and triggered a remarkable aspiration to eradicate it from the world.

The job was supposed to have been finished at the turn of the millennium, but nearly a decade and $7 billion (Dh25.71 billion) on, polio eludes us still. Last year, there were 1,500 cases in the world a tiny fraction of the 350,000 in 1985, but a real and present danger not only in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan, where polio is still endemic, but also to other countries where migrants and travellers can so easily take it.

Beside a major traffic junction, the clamour of car horns assaulting the ears, a cluster of middle-aged Britons in canary-yellow polo shirts bob about, waving and shouting at families in rickshaws with young children.

In their hands they have droppers containing vaccine and pens to mark the little finger of the left hand of every immunised child. These are some of a group of 86 Rotarians from all over the UK who have flown in to help with the latest mass immunisation day in India's two remaining endemic states Uttar Pradesh, of which Lucknow is the capital, and Bihar as well as Delhi, where children are at risk from migration from both areas.

India is the key to a polio-free world, says Oliver Rosenbauer of the WHO's polio eradication initiative.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd