Thornbury Rotary

Purple Pinkie Day at Manorbrook School

Helping the pupils learn about Polio and

Rotary’s efforts to eradicate the disease

The Fight to Eliminate Polio

Thornbury Rotary Club, is part of Rotary International who were Founding partners of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

October 24th is World Polio Day: a day to remember the tremendous progress that Rotary has helped to make in almost ridding the world of this crippling and sometimes fatal disease. Since the first project to vaccinate children in the Philippines 35 years ago, the initiative has reduced Polio cases by a staggering 99.9%.

It also reminds us that the fight must go on until there are no cases left. If we stop, all the good that has been done will be undone.

Purple Pinkie Day

One way of marking the occasion is to have a “Purple Pinkie” day, so this year Thornbury Rotary teamed up with Manorbrook Primary School to do just that. Rotarians Andrew Maxwell and Ben Bradley joined a school assembly in early October to explain to pupils what we would do and why. On the 24th, six more Rotarians (Peter Ball, Peter Moreton, Bernard Amos, Chris Fairhead, Michael Turner and Guy Rawlinson) turned up at the school armed with purple ink pads. The pupils had each brought in £1 for the privilege of putting purple dye (washable and non-toxic!) on their little fingers. Many of them made fingerprints, labelled with their names, to record the occasion. The purple pinkies represent what happens in the actual vaccination programme. In the early days each child who was vaccinated received a sweet, so some sneaked to the back of the queue so that they could get another sweet and whilst another sweet wasn’t an issue, another jab certainly was… so a non-soluble dye is now put on the finger of each vaccinated child to prevent them accidentally being jabbed again

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Purple for Polio Crocuses

Each year, Rotary clubs around the country plant purple crocus corms which, when they flower each spring, create a vibrant carpet of colour in our communities. The purple colour relates to the purple dye which is painted onto a child's finger to indicate they have received their polio immunisation.

The pupils at Manorbrook School planted 750 crocus corms to mark the ‘Purple Pinkie’ day. We hope that they and pupils to come will be able to enjoy a wonderful show of crocus flowers each Spring.

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