Media literacy is crucial for healthy societies. Rotary members are teaching people to think critically about what they see and read

 

Media literacy is crucial for healthy societies. Rotary members are teaching people to think critically about what they see and read

By Etelka Lehoczky

Email this PagThe first day at a new school can be disorienting for any teenager. But your first day at Virginia Hall High School is even stranger than most. Your grandfather claims he used to be a spy, your sister accuses some students of locking her in a closet, and everyone says a monster is stalking the hallways.

What is happening? Is any of this true? Instead of rushing off to fight the monster, you read about the weird recent events in the school newspaper. You ask yourself: Do these sources provide multiple pieces of evidence for their claims? Could they possibly be earning money because of what they’re saying? Do their stories cast a negative light on people who disagree with them?

You ask all these questions because you’re actually playing a video game designed to increase your media literacy. Co-created by Anahita Dalmia, a member of the Rotary Club of Newport Beach, California, USA, the game Agents of Influence is being developed to help 11- to 13-year-olds think critically about what they see on social media and in the news.

“We’re teaching kids to understand media bias, logical fallacies, and confirmation bias. We teach things like reading closely — tools you can use to determine what to trust online,” says Dalmia, the founder and CEO of game developer Alterea Inc.

Experts interviewed for this story recommended several nonpartisan fact-checking sites. Here are a few:

• PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning site run by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists
• Full Fact, a London, England-based factchecking site
• Snopes, a source of information on urban legends and online rumors since 1994
• FactCheck.org, a nonprofit project of the Annenberg Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, USA

Dalmia, a third-generation Rotarian, says the game’s approach was inspired partly by Rotary’s Four-Way Test.

“The first question is, ‘Is it the truth?’ And there’s a reason that’s the first question,” Dalmia says. “If it’s not the truth, you cannot make a strong judgment call based on any of the other questions, because you’re starting on an unstable foundation.”

“An unstable foundation” is one way to describe the current state of the media landscape. Experts say we’re exposed to far more media than ever before. That includes both misinformation (unintentional untruths) and disinformation (deliberate falsehoods meant to mislead people). Although many outlets are responsible and credible, figuring out what to believe can take time and effort.

“Before the internet, if I went to get a newspaper, it was run by journalists for whom truth was an important standard. Of course newspapers were biased. But today, people who want to believe things just post stuff,” says Alan Dennis, a professor of internet systems at Indiana University.

“There are active disinformation campaigns by foreign governments designed to influence voters in democratic countries. The actors have become much more sophisticated, and they have learned quite a bit about what messaging works.”

People are aware of this problem, and they say they want to become savvier about the media they consume. A study released this year found that about seven in 10 Americans were interested in learning how to better distinguish between true and false information online. But media literacy is more than just separating fact from fiction.

“We need to be able to judge things like, ‘What’s the bias behind it? Who created it? Who’s benefiting from it?’ So there’s not a simple fix here,” says Jeff Share, a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a co-author of “The Critical Media Literacy Guide.” “We need to slow down and investigate. It might mean it’s going to take me a couple more minutes, but I can go to some different sources. I can also recognize that some are more legitimate than others.”

Training storytellers

Many people believe that ideological biases and financial interests guide major news outlets’ coverage, says global grant scholar Alex Freeman, who is pursuing a master’s degree in global media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“It’s one of the big reasons that people have turned against media, but I think it’s an overcorrection,” Freeman says. “A lot of people have turned to independent journalists who are more willing to incorporate their own personal experience into their reporting. But without a traditional media apparatus — without standard practices for ensuring accuracy — it’s hard to know who’s trustworthy.”

Still, independent voices can be crucial in places where media organizations lack funding or are restricted by repressive governments. When Rotary Peace Fellow Thomas Sithole realized his hometown in Zimbabwe was ignored by major media outlets, he launched a community radio station. Then he founded the Zimbabwe Centre for Media and Information Literacy to teach people to think more critically and tell their own stories effectively. He believes the two skills are intertwined.

“We tell citizens how to arm themselves against disinformation and misinformation,” he says. The Centre also trains citizen journalists and other content creators, teaching skills like fact-checking and ensuring balance in a story.

“We’re trying to build a movement across the region, because we see that there is no appetite from our governments to push for policies that support media and information literacy among citizens,” Sithole says.

The threat of artificial intelligence

Even as he trains an army of storytellers, Sithole worries that the arrival of artificial intelligence will make it easier to create and spread disinformation.

“For unsuspecting citizens, it’s creating a lot of challenges,” he says. “It becomes very difficult now to tell whether a piece of content is true or false, especially if it’s in the form of videos or images. It’s something that is really a challenge even to the professional journalist.”

Some believe the key is educating younger media consumers. Erin McNeill meets many students through her job as CEO of the U.S.-based nonprofit Media Literacy Now, and she’s heartened by what she finds. “AI is definitely making it harder to identify good and credible sources,” McNeill says. But she says people can use the same skills to analyze human-generated and AI-generated content.

“Young people are so creative and smart. We’re educating them so they can rise to the challenge,” she says. “They’re going to find solutions as long as they’re given the skills and the education they need.”

The same belief animates Dalmia as she continues to develop and promote Agents of Influence. She has presented the game to numerous Rotary clubs and hopes Rotarians will encourage their local schools to use it. “This started as a passion project, but there was a huge demand from parents who were concerned about how social media was shaping their kids’ perspectives and interactions with the outside world,” Dalmia says. “The resounding feedback we’ve gotten is, ‘Can I have this for my kid who thinks TikTok is a reliable source of information?’”

Learn about Rotary’s work to support education and promote peace.

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Rotary projects around the globe

 

Rotary projects around the globe

October 2024

By Brad Webber

Rotary members and their partners in service come together each World Polio Day on 24 October to recognize progress in the fight to end the disease. Here is a sample of the ways members are taking action to make history and eradicate polio.

Colombia

Sonia Uribe and her husband, Alberto Londoño, created a stuffed animal collection called El Zoo del Amor, or the Zoo of Love, to comfort seriously ill children and raise money for polio eradication. Sales of Anna the giraffe, Lucas the tiger, and other animals — each wearing a shirt with Rotary and End Polio Now logos — have raised about $550,000 since their introduction in 2018. In addition to giving the animals to sick children, Rotarians carry them on their travels and snap photos of them at iconic landmarks. “All these animals have traveled, being ambassadors of the Rotary brand,” says Uribe, a member of the Rotary Club of Nuevo Medellín and, like Londoño, a past governor of District 4271. Londoño is a member of the Rotary Club of Medellín Nutibara. The couple also manage the Fundación Monica Uribe Por Amor, which assists children with spina bifida.

United States

The Rotary Club of Scranton, Pennsylvania, is helping a new generation learn about polio. Students from Dunmore High School have created a documentary based on interviews conducted during a polio and health policy symposium that the club and District 7410 organized for World Polio Day 2023. The film features interviews with International PolioPlus Committee Chair Michael McGovern, other Rotarians, and symposium attendees, and is scheduled for broadcast during the club’s World Polio Day events this month. “It is hard to get hands-on with history,” says Alan Roche, a Dunmore teacher who enlisted about 40 students to produce the video, which includes interviews with three local polio survivors, one of whom taught at the high school. The project was an eye-opener for the young people, he says. “It’s usually a page or two in the textbook, a blip in a slideshow,” Roche says. “It’s one thing to just learn about this and another to talk to someone who was affected by it and lives in your hometown.”

France

More than a dozen Rotarians and friends in southeastern France donned inflatable dinosaur costumes and stumbled along a 100-meter course in a playful footrace that raised funds and awareness for Rotary’s mission to end polio. Organized by District 1730, the T-Rex Race took place last October during the Fréjus International Air Festival, a kite fair that draws thousands of people. “The idea came to me to create an event to rejuvenate the image of Rotary in the fight against polio,” says Dinh Hoan Tran, the district’s immediate past governor and member of the Rotary Club of Nice. Spectators could place bets on the contestants. “We made people laugh and we informed people,” says Tran. More than 40 of the district’s 71 clubs participated in the event, as the district motivated clubs to “support PolioPlus to the tune of about $45,000,” he says.

South Africa

To draw attention to the need for vigilance and vaccinations, the Rotary Club of Newlands assembled Rotary members and others for a World Polio Day photo shoot with the landmark Table Mountain in the background. On the day of the shoot, however, a heavy mist enveloped the site. “We made the best of it, chatting and taking selfies, until eventually the sun came out,” says Past President Janey Ball. She used RI’s polio resources toolkit to create artwork for selfie frames and set up a Facebook event called Make Polio History to record the pictures and raise awareness. To encourage Rotary members, Ball suggested using the slogan “focus on the finish.” “The selfie frames have been in continuous use since the event, moving from one club to another,” she says.

Japan

Yoichiro Miyazaki switched into high gear to raise money for the PolioPlus Society. Miyazaki, a member of the Rotary Club of Tokyo Mitaka, cycled the length of Japan last October, covering 2,500 kilometers (1,553 miles) in 24 days. “If you don’t act, there’s no point,” he tells Rotary Italia magazine, using a slogan developed for his year as governor of District 2750 in 2023-24. Along the way, fellow district governors, other Rotarians, and well-wishers cheered for him as he traversed twisting roads, uphill climbs, and tunnels. RI General Secretary John Hewko, another avid cyclist, offered a video message of support. Prompted by news coverage of his ride, donors contributed $140,000. Miyazaki continues to pedal strong: In late April, he finished the Osaka-to-Tokyo challenge just three hours shy of the 30-hour goal en route to more fundraising for polio.

This story originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

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https://www.rotary.org/en/rotary-projects-around-globe-october-2024

Rotarian helps vaccinate his homeland of Ethiopia

 

Rotarian helps vaccinate his homeland of Ethiopia

By JP Swenson

Image credit: Monika Lozinska

In 1997, Ezra Teshome traveled from his home in Seattle to a Rotary peace conference in Ethiopia, where he was born and raised. Rotarians there were organizing National Immunization Days. In one village, Teshome met a man and his 8-year-old daughter, who had polio. The man thought the visitors were there to cure her. He asked Teshome for help.“For the whole day, it really bothered me that the child was crippled for the rest of her life, for the loss of two drops of vaccine,” says Teshome, a member of the Rotary Club of University District of Seattle. “When I came back to the United States, I said, ‘I will come back every year to participate in National Immunization Days with my Rotarian friends.’”

The next year, about 24 people came with him. Almost every year since, he’s taken anywhere from 60 to 80 people at one time to administer vaccinations.

Ethiopia’s mountainous terrain and hot weather make transporting vaccines difficult. “When you walk three, four hours without any refrigeration system, the vaccine could start to spoil,” Teshome says. “We have built clinics and asked people to bring their kids there.” These clinics are also equipped to meet other public health needs in the communities.

The impact of Teshome’s trips has spread in other ways too. Rotarians attending his trips have helped install nearly 100 water projects throughout the country, provide 120 shelter homes, and donate ambulances.

Time magazine named Teshome a global health hero at the 2005 Time Global Health Summit. That year, Ethiopia’s national immunization campaign reached 16 million children. Looking ahead, Teshome wants to continue providing clean water access in Ethiopia, contribute to peace in the region — and see a worldwide end to polio.

This story originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

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https://www.rotary.org/en/rotarian-helps-vaccinate-his-homeland-ethiopia

Rotary has been working to eradicate polio for more than 35 y

A bride too soon

 

The survivor of an abusive arranged marriage, Fraidy Reiss wants to protect other girls from the same ordeal

At the modest Unchained office, Reiss has a wall of photos of “gutsy women.”

Images credit: Sydney Walsh

Fraidy Reiss has a tight 90 minutes between her morning meetings. She just got off a call with her staff, and she’s soon due on another with a group of legislators who have taken up the cause to end forced and child marriage. Her New Jersey office is small and humble by design. As the founder of Unchained at Last, an activist group that works to end forced marriage and child marriage in the United States, Reiss does not want her offices to be found for fear of retaliation from the people and communities both she and her clients have worked hard to escape.

Reiss is clad in her typical uniform: a skirt that sits well above the knee and platform shoes that add no less than 3 inches to her petite frame. She’s also wearing her signature bright red lipstick. “I’m having my teenage rebellion in my 40s,” says Reiss with a laugh. “I finally get the opportunity to express myself through clothing, and I’m really enjoying that.”

A collection of photos hangs on a wall. One features the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, another U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. Anita Hill, the lawyer and professor who accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, holds a place, as does Christine Blasey Ford, who made even more serious allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. A phrase above the photos proclaims “The Wall of Gutsy Women.” They serve as an ad hoc council, arbiters of strength and courage who “oversee” the organization’s daily business. Not that Reiss necessarily needs such guidance. She’s used to forging her own path.

Seventeen years ago, Reiss made a change that few ultra-Orthodox Jews ever do. She left an abusive arranged marriage — and, as a result, she also left her family and community — and began her life anew.

Every book, poster, and rip in the carpet of her office represents the life she so fiercely fought for. And it’s here that Reiss now fights for those same freedoms for thousands of women across the country.

Searching for a choice

When Reiss considers the beginning of her story, she pauses. “What people don’t understand is in the Orthodox Jewish community, it begins as soon as you are verbal,” reflects Reiss. “There was always an understanding that I was not going to have a choice about whether and when to marry.”

Despite her early indoctrination, Reiss, who was born the second youngest of six, did not hold a particularly romantic perspective on marriage. When Reiss was only 4 years old, her mother fled their family home with Reiss and her siblings in the middle of the night. “My father was very, very violent and abusive,” says Reiss, who explains that her parents were also brought together in an arranged marriage. In response to reports of extreme domestic violence, a rabbi made the rare decision to grant Reiss’ mother permission to leave her husband. It would be another seven years before Reiss’ father granted a divorce. (Under Orthodox Jewish law, only the husband has the power to divorce his wife.) Watching her mother live in that limbo between separation and divorce weighed heavily on Reiss. “She was considered an agunah, or a chained woman whose husband won’t give her a divorce,” says Reiss, who recalls hearing her mother cry herself to sleep at night. “It’s a hellish experience. Instead of getting support from the community, you’re shamed for your helplessness. My mother was doubly victimized.” 

A matchmaker paired Reiss with her future husband, whom she married at 19, and she had the first of her two daughters when she was 20. Courtesy of Fraidy Reiss

The experience raised many questions for a young Reiss, queries she was told to temper. “I remember saying things like, ‘Why can’t a woman grant a divorce?’” says Reiss. “The misogyny of it never made sense to me.”

Neither Reiss’ mother’s saga nor the young girl’s probing, however, altered Reiss’ own fate to marry at 19. Like her mother and nearly every woman of their Haredi Jewish community, Reiss was paired with a husband through a matchmaker. Reiss had her first daughter at 20 and her second at 24. By 27, Reiss found herself trapped in a familiar script. Her husband, like her father, was violent and abusive. But when she approached her mother looking for safe haven, Reiss says, her mother turned her away. “I told her I was scared for my life,” recalls Reiss. “I told her my husband made it clear that he was going to kill me.” Her mother turned away. “She just walked out of the room. She didn’t even answer me.”  The memory still brings tears to her eyes.

Looking back, Reiss believes that her mother’s dismissal reflected the long-abused woman’s own trauma. “That was the best she could do,” reflects Reiss, who hasn’t spoken to her mother since leaving the Orthodox Jewish community for good. Child and forced marriage practices, explains Reiss, rarely exist in a vacuum. “Forced marriages are almost always part of a cycle that’s been going on for generations. This is a national issue. It impacts every community, religion, and socioeconomic level you can think of.”

An uphill battle for better laws

According to data collected by Reiss and her colleagues at Unchained at Last, nearly 300,000 minors were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2018. Up until 2018, child marriage remained legal in every state. While some states have a minimum age requirement of 18, most allow for minors to marry with parental or judicial consent. Because marriage is regulated by the states, there is no federal law that bans child marriage. That means in most states across the country, minors can be forced into a marriage without the ability to exit one. 

Most wedded minors included in the research were 16 or 17 years old when they married, though the report suggests that children as young as 10 have been compelled into marriage. Among the minors married during that period, 86 percent were girls, and most were wed to adult men.

Over the last six years, Reiss and her Unchained at Last team have helped to get legislation passed prohibiting child marriage in 13 states. Delaware led the change in 2018, becoming the first state to set the minimum marriage age at 18 and effectively ban child marriage. It was soon followed by New Jersey. Other states that have since enacted similar laws that set the legal minimum age at 18 include Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, and most recently, New Hampshire.

A cup containing pens that were collected each time a state ended child marriage, some of which were used to sign the legislation. Image credit: Sydney Walsh

But overturning the practice in every U.S. state appears an uphill battle. The Wyoming Republican Party, for example, has given voice to concerns that restricting child marriage could prevent teen parents from raising their children together. Similarly, a Republican legislator in West Virginia opposed a ban on child marriage, contending that such restrictions would push young people to cross state lines to seek a marriage license. And lawmakers in several states argue that certain extenuating circumstances — religious and cultural customs or teen pregnancy, for example — are reasons to leave the laws unchanged.

But Reiss is not without conservative allies. “Years ago, when our great-grandparents got married at 14 or 15, women didn’t have equality,” says Missouri state Senator Holly Thompson Rehder, a Republican, who went through a child marriage. And so Thompson Rehder, who is vocal in her opposition to abortion access and gun control, remains an advocate to end child marriage. “Now we have the same opportunity that men do to become educated, to become the breadwinners. Us getting married early cuts off our opportunity.”

A report published by the International Center for Research on Women notes that girls who marry before 19 have historically been more likely to drop out of school and complete fewer years of their education than their peers who marry later. According to the World Bank, child marriage is strongly linked to higher rates of economic dependency, lower earnings, and greater likelihood of living in poverty. And then there’s the social and psychological impact. Some research suggests that teenage brides have higher rates of psychological stress. “We want better for our girls,” insists Thompson Rehder.

A quest for empowerment

Around the time that Reiss’ mother ignored her daughter’s plea for help, Reiss filed a temporary restraining order against her husband. It didn’t last long: A rabbi sent a lawyer to take Reiss to the courthouse to withdraw it. That’s when the mother of two understood that if she wanted to break loose from her marriage, she’d have to do it on her own. 

In the following weeks, Reiss made a five-year plan. First, she started hiding money in a cereal box. “Like a lot of abusers, my husband would buy me jewelry after he was really violent,” says Reiss. She would return the jewelry and take the cash in its place, sometimes as much as $1,500. Reiss also started pocketing money her husband gave her to buy new wigs worn by Orthodox Jewish women, which can cost upward of $5,000. “I would blow dry and wash my old wigs,” explains Reiss. “It’s really hard to make them look new, but I figured it out.”

Against a backdrop of wedding dresses, Fraidy Reiss stands defiantly inside the Unchained at Last office.

Images credit: Sydney Walsh

Reiss enrolled in the undergraduate program at Rutgers University, a decision that made her husband furious. “But I said, ‘How exactly are you going to stop me?’” says Reiss. “My whole family tried to stop me, but I insisted.” By the time Reiss graduated five years later at age 32, she’d stashed away $40,000.

Over a decade into her marriage, Reiss changed the locks on her house and filed for divorce. When she later bought her own house at age 36, Reiss and her two daughters named it palais de triomphe. “The house meant that not only had I left a bad situation,” says Reiss, “but that I’d arrived at a better one.”

Finally on steady ground, Reiss wanted to find a way to help other people trapped in similar circumstances. In 2011, she founded Unchained at Last. “When I went through this, I was so alone,” says Reiss. “And I wanted to be there for others in a way that nobody was for me.” As a working single mother, Reiss figured she could help five people her first year; by the end of the year, she had helped 30.

Center stage at Rotary

The United Nations and other international agencies consider child marriage, which disproportionately affects girls, to be a human rights violation. And yet, says Ana Cutter, “1 in 5 girls experiences child marriage around the world.” A Rotary Peace Fellow (Chulalongkorn, 2016), Cutter offered up that startling statistic in 2022 as she hosted a panel devoted to ending child marriage at Rotary Day with UNICEF.

Today Cutter is the Washington, D.C., liaison for the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. According to the office, more than 650 million women were married before they were 18 — and every year, another 12 million girls enter those ranks.

“This is a problem and a challenge obviously that cannot just be addressed by women and girls,” Cutter told her global audience at the event. “We need men and boys as well to work with us to end and prevent child marriage” — a fact that members of Rotary, regardless of gender, have acted upon for years.

In India, the Rotary Club of Budge Budge, based in Kolkata, has been working in West Bengal state to reduce child marriage and improve educational and economic opportunities for girls. With help from a $56,000 global grant from The Rotary Foundation, the club recently assisted nonprofit Nishtha’s Girls to Girls program, which, according to the grant sponsors, placed “special emphasis ... upon stopping child marriage.”

In 2015, Reiss left her job as an investigator to work for Unchained at Last full time. Since then, she has grown the organization to eight employees with more than $2 million in total assets. She now stands among the country’s most vocal activists speaking out against child and forced marriage.

And when Rotary International was looking for someone to speak about ending child marriage at a Rotary Day with UNICEF convocation in 2022 devoted to empowering girls, it turned to Reiss. “A lot of people don’t realize child marriage is a real problem here in the United States,” said Reiss, addressing the live audience at UNICEF headquarters in New York City and Rotary members around the world who attended the webinar. The “obvious and clear solution”? “Change the laws.”

Manipulation and abuse

As for those first five women Reiss hoped to help start a new life? That number now totals close to 1,000. One thousand women for whom Reiss and her Unchained team have helped craft escape plans, find emergency shelter, and connect with pro bono legal counsel and career and psychiatric counseling. What’s more, Unchained brings survivors together to share their experiences with one another, an invaluable therapeutic resource.

Jennifer Brown is one of those women. At 16, Brown was married to a 23-year-old man she’d only known for two months. The marriage, says Brown, was the idea of her stepmother, who, Brown says, wanted the teenager out of the house. “For whatever reason, she didn’t like me,” recalls Brown. “And she found out that this guy wanted to marry me, and she convinced my dad to marry me off.”

Brown was a sophomore at her Mississippi high school when her father walked her down the aisle. She says her husband was abusive and would regularly fall into fits of rage, but Brown still clung to the relationship. “I didn’t know anything else,” she says. Brown reached a breaking point a year and a half into the marriage after a particularly brutal fight. “They say it takes seven times for a woman to leave an abusive partner, and that feels very true to me,” recalls Brown.

Brown only started to consider what she had experienced when she began seeing a therapist years later. “It took me a very, very long time to process,” says Brown, who was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

As she reflected on her early life, Brown decided to search for other child marriage survivors. Brown wrote “I was married at 16.” on the Unchained at Last Facebook page, and someone from Reiss’ team invited her to share her story. At first Brown was hesitant, but she found the process powerful. “It felt good to know that there was a tribe of women who had similar experiences,” she says. “It felt good, but also horrifying.”

Research and protest

Back at the Unchained office, in a few minutes Reiss will hop on another of her frequent videoconference calls, this one with a team of Columbia University researchers who are partnering with Unchained to run a three-year study on forced marriage, forced marital sex, and forced parenthood in the United States. “It’s the first study of its kind,” says Reiss, excited. “Our goal is to come up with policy recommendations and push for those policies to be implemented.”

Since 2015, Reiss (second from right) and Unchained at Last have staged protests, called “chain-ins,” at capitols across the country, including this one in Boston in 2021.

Matilde Simas/Courtesy of Unchained at Last

Research is one way Reiss and her team advocate for change. Protest is another. In 2015, Reiss started hosting what she calls “chain-ins,” or gatherings of women donning bridal gowns and chains who come together to protest child and forced marriage. Reiss has held 20 across the country, including several on the steps of state Capitol buildings. The visual — a group of women in wedding dresses with black tape covering their mouths — is a powerful one. And Reiss says that it has inspired women all over the country to send her their wedding dresses. Unchained now has an inventory of dozens of donated wedding dresses, all of which are organized and cataloged at the Unchained offices. “We’re constantly getting bridal gowns,” she says. “I just got three more today.”

As she continues her fight, Reiss travels all over the country promoting Unchained’s missions to hundreds of policymakers, advocates, and survivors. But while the big podiums matter, Reiss says quiet moments hold importance too. Like, the words of wisdom she shares with her daughters who are now young adults. The kind of advice Reiss wishes she might have received some 30 years ago. “The message I wish I had heard is, you deserve help,” she says, “and you can get it.”

Fraidy Reiss will make sure of that.

A Milwaukee journalist, Elly Fishman is the author of Refugee High: Coming of Age in America (2021), which won the Studs and Ida Terkel Award for a first book in the public interest.

This story originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

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https://www.rotary.org/en/bride-too-soon

The polio shot heard round the world

 

A son recalls his father’s great medical achievement

By Dr. Peter L. Salk

Illustrations by Cristian Barba Camarena

I have been president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation since its founding in 2009. As you can imagine, focusing my attention in that role on the legacy of my father’s many contributions to humanity — including his creation of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, just up the road in La Jolla on a bluff overlooking California’s magnificent Pacific Coast — has a special significance for me.

My father, Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the first polio vaccine, was born in New York City on 28 October 1914, exactly three months after the beginning of World War I. From his earliest days, he was someone who wanted to do something to be helpful to humanity. That impulse and drive may have come in part from an incident that was imprinted in his memory when he was a little boy. At the end of the war, on Armistice Day in 1918, he witnessed a parade filled with soldiers who had come home from battle. Some had been injured or maimed, walking with crutches or using a wheelchair. My father always had a sensitive side, and he was deeply affected by what he had seen.

As he grew older, my father considered going to law school and running for Congress. His mother, who had come over to this country from Russia, astutely advised him that this was not a good decision — especially since, as she put it, “you can’t even win an argument with me.” I think she wanted him to become a rabbi, which I don’t think was in my father’s character.

As it turned out, my father decided to go to City College in New York, and there his studies took an unexpected turn. In his first year, a chemistry course was offered, and this appealed to him. The problem was that the class met on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. His parents were very

observant in following Jewish traditions and customs, which meant that my father had a difficult decision to make. In the end, he took the chemistry class, which was the starting point for what turned out to be a long and productive career.

After college, having had such a positive experience training in the sciences, my father enrolled in the New York University College of Medicine. From the start, he knew that he wanted to go into research. During a first-year micro-biology class, a professor spoke about vaccines. He explained that, though doctors could use chemically inactivated toxins to vaccinate against bacterial diseases such as diphtheria and tetanus, they could not use inactivated viruses to immunize against viral diseases such as influenza or polio because protection against infection with viruses required that the body experience an actual infection with the living virus.

That didn’t make any sense to my father, and when he asked his teacher why, the professor basically responded, “Well, just because.” That unsatisfactory answer set my father on a journey of discovery that would fulfill his dream to help humanity, in ways and to a degree that he could never have imagined. And it was a journey on which his family, including his three sons, would be carried along.

Following medical school, after a two-year clinical internship at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, my father went to work with Dr. Thomas Francis Jr., then the head of the epidemiology department at the University of Michigan. My father had previously worked with Dr. Francis on influenza while still a student at NYU College of Medicine, and that had been a seminal experience for him. Working alongside his mentor at Michigan, my father made important contributions to the successful creation of an influenza vaccine, utilizing a chemically inactivated virus, that was introduced for use by the Army at the end of World War II.

In 1947, seeking to head a laboratory of his own, my father moved on to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. There he took charge of creating the Virus Research Laboratory and, with his growing interest in polio, received a grant for polio research from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

As all of this was going on, my father had married and started a family. He met my mother, Donna, while working one summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. They married on 9 June 1939, the day after he graduated from medical school with an M.D. degree. I was born five years later, the first of my parents’ three sons. During my childhood, polio epidemics became an increasing global scourge. I can remember my parents not allowing us to visit a beloved amusement park when we were on vacation, out of fear of our becoming infected. On another occasion, our family accompanied my father to a polio meeting at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. There I saw a girl at a swimming pool who had been disabled by the disease. Because I was around the same age as the girl, that encounter had a lasting impact on me.

During all this time my father and his team were rigorously working to develop a vaccine that would be effective against all three immunologic types of polio. The first human studies with the experimental vaccine were conducted at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children outside of Pittsburgh. These tests included children who had already experienced some form of paralysis due to polio. Because they had already been infected by at least one of the three types of poliovirus, there was no danger they could become paralyzed again if they were injected with the chemically inactivated virus of the same type. It turned out that when these children were injected with the inactivated virus, their antibodies against the virus were boosted. Since antibodies in the blood stream were all that was needed to prevent the virus from traveling to the brain and spinal cord and killing the nerve cells that control muscle movement, when that information was confirmed, my father knew that the vaccine he and his team had been working on should be a success.

At one point early on, my father had tested the experimental vaccine on himself and his lab workers. And one day it was our turn, me and my two brothers, ages 9, 6, and not quite 3 years old. As you can imagine, I was not very happy to be part of this joyful experience. Our father came home with the vaccine, and he proceeded to sterilize the daunting glass syringes and the metal needles by boiling them on the kitchen stove. I was absolutely not a fan of needles — but what child is? I stood there, miserable and looking out the window, my arm held out and awaiting the injection. And then something miraculous happened: I didn’t feel the needle. It didn’t hurt, unlike every other shot I’d ever had. And for that reason, that day is burnt into my memory forever.

Two years later, on 12 April 1955, my father joined Dr. Francis at a press conference at the University of Michigan. Dr. Francis had been tasked with analyzing the results of the vast clinical trial of the experimental vaccine, and now he made an announcement that would change medical history: The vaccine had been demonstrated to be up to 90 percent effective in preventing polio. Pandemonium broke loose. Kids were let out of school, church bells rang, factory whistles blew. The pall of fear that had pervaded this country for so many years was lifted. I get goose bumps thinking about it even all these years later.

In 1955, more than 10 million children received one or more injections of the Salk vaccine. Within one year, polio cases and deaths in the United States had been nearly halved, a trend that continued and made a vision of polio eradication a possibility.

Today, that goal is getting ever closer to reality. Rotary International has been a champion in ensuring that one day — and, I hope, one day soon — that goal will be reached. Rotary helped found the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, and it continues to put a major emphasis on getting the job done, as does the Gates Foundation, with its generous donations, and the other organizations that are part of the GPEI. Everyone is working unbelievably hard, and practical work is being done on the ground where it’s most essential. Efforts are underway to remove obstacles and deal with societal issues that have impeded progress in some remaining parts of the world.

The contributions Rotary has made toward eradicating polio have been indispensable, and its indomitable spirit has been a driving force in this effort. I’ve had the great pleasure on many occasions of speaking to and with members of Rotary, and each time it has been an uplifting experience. The desire shared by Rotary members to help the world is inspiring and mirrors the driving force in my father’s life.

My father was the author of several books. One of them, recently published in an updated version as A New Reality: Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future, he co-wrote with my brother Jonathan. Seeing that title, and the titles of the other books he wrote, provides insights into where my father’s interests and hopes lay. They also suggest where we should turn our efforts and energies next.

As my father did with polio, we need to go beyond theorizing. We can have grand desires for the human species, but we need to create and utilize real and useful tools that can have a direct impact on societal interactions and environmental imbalances. Humanity seems to be facing monumental problems, but they can be overcome. Just look at what my father accomplished. Seventy years ago, there was a vaccine in a bottle, and today we’re almost at the point of achieving a once unimaginable outcome.

I feel a devotion to my father, and I feel a responsibility to ensure that his ways of thinking and his contributions are fully understood. He embraced the entire world in his scientific, humanistic, and philosophical vision for the future, and the elements of his legacy will continue to reach into everyone’s lives.

Dr. Peter L. Salk is president of the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation in La Jolla, California, and a part-time professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.

This story originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

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