The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) that is concerned with international public health. It was established on 7 April 1948, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and is a member of the United Nations Development Group. Its predecessor, the Health Organization, was an agency of the League of Nations.
The constitution of the World Health Organization had been signed by all 61 countries of the United Nations by 22 July 1946, with the first meeting of the World Health Assembly finishing on 24 July 1948. It incorporated the Office International d'Hygiène Publique and the League of Nations Health Organization. Since its creation, WHO has been responsible for playing a leading role in the eradication of smallpox. Its current priorities include communicable diseases, in particular, HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis; the mitigation of the effects of non-communicable diseases; sexual and reproductive health, development, and aging; nutrition, food security and healthy eating; occupational health; substance abuse; and drive the development of reporting, publications, and networking. WHO is responsible for the World Health Report, a leading international publication on health, the worldwide World Health Survey, and World Health Day (7th-April of every Year).
Its links with the International Atomic Energy Agency and distribution of contraception have both proved controversial, as have guidelines on healthy eating and the 2009 flu pandemic.
Famous quotes containing the words world, health and/or organization:
“O you mighty gods!
This world I do renounce, and in your sights
Shake patiently my great affliction off.
If I could bear it longer, and not fall
To quarrel with your great opposeless wills,
My snuff and loathed part of nature should
Burn itself out.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“In the continual enterprise of trying to guide appropriately, renegotiate with, listen to and just generally coexist with our teenage children, we ourselves are changed. We learn even more clearly what our base-line virtues are. We listen to our teenagers and change our minds about some things, stretching our own limits. We learn our own capacity for flexibility, firmness and endurance.”
—Jean Jacobs Speizer. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Collective, ch. 4 (1978)
“Your organization is not a praying institution. It’s a fighting institution. It’s an educational institution right along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)