The Stuff of Champions

Are you ready?

By Lara Popovich & Michelle Bonjour

Minda Dentler held her three-month old baby as the little girl received her first polio vaccine. An ordinary occurrence for most, but not this mom: Minda was seated in a wheelchair, having contracted polio as a baby born to an impoverished single mother in India. If an American couple hadn’t adopted her, she believes she never would have survived past
childhood.

Minda holding her baby while she gets vaccinated

Now Minda has a family, a career and she has completed an Ironman competition (covering over 140 miles using just her arms). She is a champion in many ways, including being an advocate for the UN Foundation’s campaign Shot@Life,. You’re invited to be one, too.

We met Minda Dentler in the underground meeting rooms of the Citibank tower in Manhattan, after her speech to hundreds of us at a conference put on by the UN Foundation called the Moms + Social Good Campaign. We’d come to learn what we and the group we founded, the Immunization Ambassadors, could do to help.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably involved in the giving and tracking of immunizations. Odds are you work in North America in a place where a couple hundred cases of measles makes news. But at Shot@Life, they agonize over a much bigger number: 1.5 million children in developing countries dying of preventable illnesses. Every year. Or, put another way, one child every 20 seconds.

To rally American support for international efforts, the UN Foundation began the Shot@Life campaign, bringing together two of the heavyweights of philanthropy, Ted Turner and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

(It was 20 years ago, this year, that Ted Turner began the modern era of big money gifts with his $1 billion donation to the UN to create the UN Foundation. Five years ago, when the Gates Foundation recognized the cost-effective work that the UN Foundation was doing with childhood vaccines, they put up the money to create an expanded program, and that’s when Shot@Life was created.)

We met Shot@Life’s Director, Martha Rebour (pronounced raBOOR), at the conference. She noted the intersection of those two great philanthropic efforts, saying, “It says something when such thoughtful, visionary leaders support the work we’re doing.”

L to R: Lara Povovich, Martha Rebour, Michelle Bonjour

Martha herself comes from a marketing/branding background, with a number of years at Discovery Channel, including working on the marketing of “Shark Week.” So it wasn’t surprising that she called her career change, joining Shot@Life in 2014, a “pivot.” We could feel the passion for her new work as she described travels to the field in Haiti, Rwanda and Zambia:

“I’ve been lucky enough to get out in the field to meet with health care workers, ones who’ve seen measles come through their villages, and these are villages in parts of the world where conditions are such that measles is often fatal. Those health care workers, and the mothers they serve, understand vaccinations in a different way.

I’ve seen mothers walk for miles, carrying a baby and with toddlers in tow, to stand in line under a hot sun waiting to get the children vaccinated. And, in some small way, I get to contribute to that.”

And Martha and Shot@Life invite everyone to contribute, too. They have a Champions program to educate volunteer advocates for global immunizations. They now have over 1400 such volunteers. Once you’ve joined, you’ll receive training via webinars, or you can apply for the annual Champion Summit in Washington, DC. The responsibilities of a Champion? Martha told us, “First and foremost, you’ll be expected to become informed to speak knowledgeably on the work of the UN Foundation, the Shot@Life campaign, and the vaccines we support: measles, polio, pneumococcal and rotavirus. You’ll also be asked to reach out to your Member of Congress and build a relationship advocating for global vaccines. Some of our Champions also get involved in fundraising and educational efforts.”

It’s a simple application, available here:

Apply Today

COMING FULL CIRCLE

Minda as a kid

Let us finish by going back to the Champion whose story we opened with, Minda Dentler.

In 2015, Minda traveled to India to be part of an immunization campaign. This is how she explained the emotions of that experience on stage:

Minda in India

I realized in that moment that my life had come full circle. My mother didn’t have access to the vaccine when I was a baby and I contracted polio. I had a daughter and was able to get her immunized and now I have traveled to my home country, India, and given the vaccine to other children.

Here in the U.S., getting children vaccinated is just another parental task– getting the kids to the doctor’s office and waiting for the shot. So picture how different that experience was for Minda when she had her baby vaccinated. She took her daughter at age three months and she asked the doctor to let her get a picture of the moment, the one you saw earlier.

During her speech, Minda recalled that she teared up just after that photo, and that she “cried the entire way home.” It hit her in that moment that her daughter would enjoy all those childhood firsts that she herself had never experienced: the first steps, the running, the jumping.

Yes, the rest of us may take vaccines for granted, but that’s something you can’t do when you’re a polio survivor holding your baby while sitting in your wheelchair.

Our Photos from the Moms + Social Good Conference

How Sports Teams Work to Prevent Flu & Mumps, 
And What Our Office Teams Can Learn From Them

By Dale Dauten, Syndicated Columnist

“You can only control so much. If you want to get technical about it, the players shouldn’t even be passing the ball to each other.”

That’s former head trainer for the Atlanta Hawks, David Wharton, on trying to keep players from passing the flu to each other.

 “If someone in the pile got it, then we all got it.”

Minnesota Wild beats the LA Kings 5-4 on February 27,2017

That’s Eric Staal, center for the Minnesota Wild hockey team, talking about mumps, and about how it could have spread during the team’s celebration of its overtime victory against L.A. in late February.

A few weeks before the Wild were congratulating each other on their win, the flu was running through the Pittsburgh Steelers. That was a big deal because it came as they were preparing for their AFC Championship game against the Patriots. Imagine spending millions of dollars and months of effort, while carrying the hopes of a city, and then mumps or the flu keeps players from performing. So it’s not surprising to see a report like this one from ESPN…

“The recent mumps outbreak in the NHL led to emergency team-wide immunizations, occasional player quarantines, the cancellation of holiday hospital visits and a re-examination of the league’s infectious disease prevention policies.”

Makes sense. But hold on. That report was from 2014. That was the previous outbreak. So today we ask…

What have sports teams learned about protecting their workplace teams?

And, do their precautions really make a difference?

FIRST, THE VACCINATIONS

New Mexico quarterback B.R. Holbrook

Let’s go back and take a peek at a prevention program just a few years ago…

Brent Holbrook Now

I asked STC’s Brent Holbrook, who was the quarterback for the University of New Mexico Lobos from 2006-2008, what he remembered about efforts to keep his teams from picking up infections. He said, “The one thing I can remember is the flu shots. There would be an announcement of flu shots on the big white board in the locker room. You’d walk over to the trainers’ facility and get the shot. I remember it was always a Monday, and then the next couple days the trainers would come around and find anyone who hadn’t gotten a shot and remind them to get theirs. I don’t know that there was a policy that you had to get one, but I never heard of anyone objecting.”

(It’s not surprising that the shots were given early in the week. Research on the timing of vaccinations for athletes suggests allowing as much time as possible before the next competition. There is even research suggesting that the ideal timing of the vaccination is six hours after exercising.)

In Brent’s experience, vaccinations were all that the team offered in disease prevention. “It was pretty casual,” he recalled. “The trainers went around with buckets of water and everyone dipped their cups into it, and the trainers had towels thrown over their shoulders – you’d wipe off your face on a towel and put it back on the trainer and the next would grab that same towel and wipe his face.”

DO NOT PASS THAT TOWEL

That towel sharing is less likely today. In fact, the NBA has gone so far as to have a policy on towel sharing – strictly forbidden. Once a towel is towel touches a player, it’s straight to the laundry. (A trainer for the L.A. Lakers put the towel count at 250-300 per game.) And teams in every major sport have policies on not sharing cups or water bottles, as well as procedures to routinely wipe down locker rooms with disinfectant.

THE BOTTOM LINE: DO THE PRECAUTIONS REALLY MATTER?

With so many variables involved in the passing of disease, it’s difficult to test the overall effects of a team’s illness prevention effort. However, there is one study, conducted by five Norwegian researchers, that put numbers to it.

2006 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony

The Norwegian Winter Olympic team had a tough time of it in the Turin games of 2006, with 13 athletes getting sick and eight missing competition (out of 75 athletes). So, for the Vancouver games, the team undertook an aggressive prevention program.

Even before getting to the games, there was this:

“An extensive vaccination program for athletes, coaches and support staff against the H1N1 flu, seasonal influenza and pertussis/whooping cough was carried out, both at our Olympic sports center and with ambulatory personnel during team training camps.”

Then, among the measures during the competition…

• those deemed susceptible to respiratory tract infections were housed in single rooms,
• special indoor air cleaning systems were employed,
• there were “routines of minimized hand shaking and close contact with people outside the team,’ and
• carpeted hotel rooms were covered in plastic.

In other words, the Norwegians created a germophobe’s paradise. So…

How did they do?

While there could be no claims of cause and effect, the authors were able to report a drop in illness, from 17% (of 75 athletes) in Turin to 5% (of 100) in Toronto. The number of missing competitions dropped from eight to four, despite the larger team.

But hold on: the authors also reported that “the average illness rate for all nations in the Vancouver games was 7%.”

So was the intense anti-illness campaign worth the effort? We can’t even make conclusions about the size of the decrease, much less the cause — maybe the drop was something like ten percentage points, or maybe it was more like two.

So, again, is it worth the effort?

If it were possible to figure out which were the four Norwegian Olympians who did not miss competitions, and if we could ask them for their opinions, we know what it would be: THANK YOU! We can only conclude that every effort to protect athletes is good for the health of the team, and surely it gives a boost to morale, knowing that the team cares.

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References:

Quotes from Lakers’ and Hawks’ athletic trainers are from L.A. Times, March 10, 2009, David Wharton.

Eric Staal quote is from FoxNews.com, March 1, 2017.

Research on timing of vaccinations from are from Sports Medicine (Auckland New Zealand), 2014, by Barbara Gartner and Tim Meyer.

The Norwegian study appeared in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2012, by Dag Vidar Hanstad, et.al.