75 years of the WHO: Not the global health police we need

NEW YORK: In April 1945, politicians from around the world gathered in San Francisco to establish the United Nations. At the meeting, leaders from Brazil and China suggested the creation of another global organization: one specifically devoted to global health rather than global politics. The World Health Organization (WHO) was born three years later, when its constitution came into effect on April 7, 1948. It states that health is a human right that every human being is entitled to, “without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition” and that “the health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security.” The organization’s headquarters are based in Geneva, Switzerland, with six regional and 150 country offices across the world.

“Without a doubt, we will experience more frequent and more severe health threats in the future,” Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University in New York, told DW. “We have to work hard at coming together to confront these health threats. This means thinking beyond nationalistic priorities, it means coming together around joint priorities, and most importantly it means supporting organizations like WHO that work for the collective good.”

In its 75-year-long history, the WHO, which has been led by Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus since 2017, has had some major successes as well some failures. One of the biggest successes in the WHO’s quest to ensure the global population’s well-being came in 1980, when the organization officially announced it had wiped out a common but deadly centuries-old infectious disease. “Perhaps the most noteworthy [success] was the eradication of smallpox, the only human disease to be eradicated,” said El-Sadr, who also leads Columbia University’s Mailman School’s Global Health Initiative. “While there were others involved in this effort, the WHO played a key role galvanizing the world around this goal.”

Christoph Gradmann, a professor of the history of medicine at Norway’s University of Oslo, said smallpox eradication was a perfect example of when the WHO works best: In situations of political agreement.

“When member states aren’t on the same page about how to proceed, the organization is paralysed,” Gradmann said. “During the Cold War, there was wide-reaching agreement across the two blocs that the eradication of smallpox was a goal to be tackled. That’s when the WHO has seen its biggest successes: When members agree on which projects are worthy to be undertaken and how.” Many experts agreed the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone offers an example of a WHO job less well done. The organization was criticized, among other things, for not reacting swiftly enough to address the epidemic.

But El-Sadr says a lot of the criticism following the outbreak, which ended in 2016, was due to a misunderstanding of how the WHO works.

“There were unrealistic expectations for WHO, with many expecting [the organization] to go in force to the affected countries to confront the outbreak,” El-Sadr said. “This is not within the WHO’s mandate. Its role is to guide the response, develop guidance, but not to go into a country to help address a specific health threat.” Gradmann agreed. “The WHO is a democratic organization,” Gradmann said. “It is not a world health police made for quick interventions.” In fact, the WHO has no authority to take action in a member state unless that member state asks for help.

This article was provided by Deutsche Welle