Ordering a pizza on Saturday in Chatham will help fight polio half way around the world.
Keith Koke with the Chatham Rotary Club says it's the first year for the fundraiser which sees a portion of every pizza sold go to the effort to eradicate polio. He hopes it will help finish off a disease which still sees just under 500 cases a year in the Middle East.
"The reason why we're so slow in Afghanistan and Pakistan is because of wars and also religious beliefs that think that we're trying to sterilize their kids and things like that," says Koke.
In 1985 there were 350,000 reported polio cases worldwide before the disease was eradicated from the entire Western Hemisphere in 1991 through vaccination programs.
"When you see the 'crawlers' that can't walk and will never walk and 60 cents will prevent someone from contracting polio, from that point of view we should have done this [eradicate polio] a long time ago," says Koke.
Koke says Rotary's goal is to see polio finally eradicated worldwide by 2018.
Click here for the full list of restaurants participating in the Pizza For Polio fundraiser.
