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How can one help PolioPlus Ride 2003?
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PolioPlus Updates 2002 Foundation selected as recipient of Gates Award for Global Health The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on 20 May announced its selection of The Rotary Foundation as the recipient of the 2002 Gates Award for Global Health. The US$1 million award recognizes Rotary's leadership and impact in the field of public health, most notably its efforts to eradicate polio by 2005. The Gates Foundation commended Rotary for contributing more than $462 million toward polio eradication and mobilizing more than one million Rotarians to help immunize more than two billion children against polio in 122 countries. It also lauded Rotary for its health and welfare projects around the world, including a revolving loan program to help women in Uganda break the link between AIDS and chronic poverty, a project to provide free tuberculosis screening and treatment for children in the Philippines, and a major educational campaign to reduce the incidence of parasitic disease that reached more than 2.4 million children with more than 350,000 being treated for parasites. "The Rotary Foundation is truly deserving of recognition
for its exemplary achievements in the field of global health," said Bill
Gates Sr., co-chair and chief executive officer of the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation. "I've seen Rotary volunteers in action and they
do tremendous work. We should never take for granted the generosity and
hard work of people in communities everywhere who volunteer their time
and resources to make a difference in
Gates Sr. will present the award to Rotary Foundation Trustee Chairman Luis Vicente Giay during the annual conference of the Global Health Council in Washington, D.C., on 30 May. The council, which administers the award process, was established in 1972 to identify priority world health problems and to report on them to governments, the media, and nonprofit organizations. "We thank the Gates Foundation for recognizing the important
role that Rotary plays in the effort to improve the health of men, women,
and children worldwide," Giay said. "Rotary receives this award with great
humility, but we are so proud that this honor recognizes the critical role
civil society plays in the fight to give people in developing nations access
to effective immunizations and health care. We also believe that the award
will help raise awareness of the crucial need to eradicate polio now, when
we have the
The Gates Award for Global Health annually recognizes
an organization that has made a major, lasting contribution to the field
of global health. Criteria for recipients include extraordinary contributions
toward progress in the knowledge and practice of health in low-income societies;
demonstrated leadership; an established record of achievement; innovation
in program design; organizational capacity; collaboration with others;
evidence
The first Gates Award went last year to the Centre for Health and Population Research in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Centre pioneered the discovery and development of oral rehydration solution, which today saves the lives of 2.5 million children every year. Based in Seattle, Washington, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to improving people's lives by sharing advances in health and learning with the global community. It has an endowment of $23 billion. More information on how to publicize news of this prestigious
recognition in your community is available at
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