World Health Organization

The World Health Organization (Who)

WHO was founded in 1948 as the designated UN agency for connecting “nations, partners, and people” with the goal of promoting good health around the globe. The goal for WHO is intended to create a way to coordinate worldwide health emergences as well as to assist individuals no matter how old in living and achieving good health founded in science-based policies and programs.

Following the end of World War II, WHO was conceived at the UN Conference on International Organizations held in San Francisco. From 1946 to 1948, the organization was formed with 18 states and the first World Health Assembly was held in Geneva in the summer of 1948.

Initially, the goals of WHO were focused on “malaria, tuberculosis, venereal diseases, maternal and child health, sanitary engineering, and nutrition (Lancet, 2002) and had a budget of just $5 million. As WHO grew, new areas of concern were added such as smallpox, disease control and eradication, family planning, maternal morbidity, polio, immunizations, environmental health, and AIDS (Lancet, 2002). In the first decade of its existence, the WHO focused many of its resources on sanitary conditions in improving health and protecting individuals from diseases such as Cholera. Vaccinations for smallpox and polio were created in an effort to reduce the millions of deaths as a result of these diseases (WHO).

As WHO grew along with the number of health concerns worldwide, in the second decade the organization maintained a strong focus on sanitary regulations and maintaining its focus on cholera, plague, small box, and yellow fever. In its third decade, WHO created programs for research and training in areas including tropical and infectious diseases in marginalized populations. Moving into its four decade the discovery and diagnosis of AIDS took the forefront by creating a global program on HIV/AIDS. At the same time, the organization was working on its final plans for the eradication of polio.

As WHO reached its 50^th anniversary, new initiatives were put into plus in creating a Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, to prevent the spread of viruses and infectious diseases on an international level. To this day, WHO remains committed to eradicating and preventing the spread of disease. It is the international responsibilities and processes that will be focused on for the rest of this chapter.

Responsibilities

Despite the existence of studied guidelines from prior pandemics, the COVID-19 tragedy response has proven fragmented, highly political, and lacks the cross-disciplinary understanding of what and how public health crises translate into operational cooperation before, during, and after a pandemic.

While WHO did have guidelines in place from pandemics of the past, the COVID-19 pandemic brought forth questions about those guidelines, which forced change during and after the pandemic (Burkle et al., 2020). This had a huge impact on organizations such as the CDC, which led to political interventions as a result.

There are several elements involved in the responsibilities for not only WHO but supporting agencies worldwide. These responsibilities include:

Figure 1.

WHO responsibilities