who - World Health Organization

who - World Health Organization

Government agency

fact of who

Director of who - 

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

The World Health Organization (WHO)^[1] is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health.^[2] The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health".^[3] Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, it has six regional offices and 150 field offices worldwide.

Headquarters pictured on a 1966 stamp of the German Democratic Republic

The WHO was established on 7 April 1948.^[4][5] The first meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the agency's governing body, took place on 24 July of that year. The WHO incorporated the assets, personnel, and duties of the League of Nations' Health Organization and the Office International d'Hygiène Publique, including the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).^[6] Its work began in earnest in 1951 after a significant infusion of financial and technical resources.^[7]

History[edit]

Origin[edit]

The International Sanitary Conferences (ISC), the first of which was held on 23 June 1851, were a series of conferences that took place until 1938, about 87 years.^[13] The first conference, in Paris, was almost solely concerned with cholera, which would remain the disease of major concern for the ISC for most of the 19th century. With the etiology, even the communicability, of many epidemic diseases still uncertain and a matter of scientific argument, international agreement on appropriate measures was difficult to reach.^[13] Seven of these international conferences, spanning 41 years, were convened before any resulted in a multi-state international agreement. The seventh conference, in Venice in 1892, finally resulted in a convention. It was concerned only with the sanitary control of shipping traversing the Suez Canal, and was an effort to guard against importation of cholera.^[

During the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization, Szeming Sze, a delegate from China, conferred with Norwegian and Brazilian delegates on creating an international health organization under the auspices of the new United Nations. After failing to get a resolution passed on the subject, Alger Hiss, the secretary general of the conference, recommended using a declaration to establish such an organization. Sze and other delegates lobbied and a declaration passed calling for an international conference on health.^[18] The use of the word "world", rather than "international", emphasized the truly global nature of what the organization was seeking to achieve.^[19] The constitution of the World Health Organization was signed by all 51 countries of the United Nations, and by 10 other countries, on 22 July 1946

Operational history of WHO[edit]

Three former directors of the Global Smallpox Eradication Programme read the news that smallpox had been globally eradicated, 1980

1947: The WHO established an epidemiological information service via telex.^[29]: 5

1950: A mass tuberculosis inoculation drive using the BCG vaccine gets under way.^[29]: 8

1955: The malaria eradication programme was launched, although objectives were later modified. (In most areas, the programme goals became control instead of eradication.)^[29]: 9

1958: Viktor Zhdanov, Deputy Minister of Health for the USSR, called on the World Health Assembly to undertake a global initiative to eradicate smallpox, resulting in Resolution WHA11.54.^{[30][31]: 366–371, 393, 399, 419}

1965: The first report on diabetes mellitus and the creation of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.^{[29]: 10–11}

1966

source: wikipedia