Last Friday, the Park City High School Interact Club held an event at The Market in Park City to raise awareness for polio.
According to Gabby Bailey, the club president, “We’re a part of Rotary, which focuses a lot on eradicating polio. Thankfully, it is mostly eradicated in the United States, but it still poses a great threat in other countries.”
Since its inception, Rotary International has raised more than $2 billion for polio prevention, and the disease has been largely eradicated in the United States due to widespread vaccination that ended in 2000.
Members of the Interact Club gathered outside the entrance to the Market, 1500 Snow Creek Drive, where they drew a purple line on the pinkies of people entering the store to raise awareness of the disease.
According to Bailey, “We’re just raising awareness for the disease and tagging people’s pinkies purple, which used to be a sign that you were vaccinated back in the day, if they’ve learned about polio.”
Polio is a disease that’s caused by a virus, and there are two mainly different forms: the paralytic and non-paralytic, according to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention.
The paralytic form can cause paralysis in the legs or arms and it can even hit the spinal cord, which causes lung paralysis. If this happens, the infected patient would have to use a device called an Iron Lung, which would breathe for them.
The non-paralytic form of the disease can act like the flu, but in the past, there were many cases where people were paralyzed.
Friday, Oct. 24, was National Polio Day, which is why the club chose that time to fundraise.
When asked about Rotary and what the club does, Bailey stated, “We’re just here to raise awareness about polio. Rotary’s done a lot of fundraising for it. They’ve done a lot of projects on it, so as Interact, our job is to get more people focused on the disease. ”