Weekly Newsletter | March 21, 2017

After last week’s long eBlast on the long-term importance of attracting new members, this week I will be brief and to the point. My challenge to the club is: What can we do to have 100% Food Drive participation. The answer is obvious. Let’s set a new record. Everyone give what you can. There is no cause more important than making sure that every Marion/Polk County adult and child has enough food to not go to bed hungry.
This is our annual service goal for March. It’s all about “Service Above Self.” Whether it’s $100.00 or $1.00, please give what you can. Thank you.
March 22 – Salem Convention Center
Club Meeting: Variola Vanquished? The Complex History and Legacy of Smallpox Eradication
In May of 1980, the World Health Organization declared that smallpox had been eradicated.  But in July of 2014, three forgotten vials of the smallpox virus were found at a laboratory in Maryland. How is this possible, and how worried should we be? In this presentation, Bob Reinhardt  will explore the causes, development, and legacy of the global effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1960s and 1970s. This program ultimately produced a world free of smallpox as a disease and inspired other disease control programs, like Rotary’s effort to eliminate polio – but the program also left us with the presence of the smallpox virus (variola) in high-security laboratories and in the imagination of people throughout the world.
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